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My entry into the environmental arena was through the issue that so dramatically – and destructively – demonstrates the link between science and social action: nuclear weapons.

Barry Commoner

The age of innocent faith in science and technology may be over.
BARRY COMMONER

Age May Technology
As the earth spins through space, a view from above the North Pole would encompass most of the wealth of the world – most of its food, productive machines, doctors, engineers and teachers. A view from the opposite pole would encompass most of the world’s poor.
BARRY COMMONER

Doctors Teacher Views
The environmental crisis is a sign that the ecosphere is now so heavily strained that its continued stability is threatened. It is a warning that we must discover the source of this suicidal drive and master it before it destroys the environment-and ourselves.
BARRY COMMONER

Environmental Suicidal Warning
What is new is that environmentalism intensely illuminates the need to confront the corporate domain at its most powerful and guarded point – the exclusive right to govern the systems of production.
BARRY COMMONER

Environmental Need Powerful
The modern technologist is less ‘sorcerer’ and more ‘sorcerer’s apprentice’.
BARRY COMMONER

Apprentice Modern Technology
The methods that EPA introduced after 1970 to reduce air-pollutant emissions worked for a while, but over time have become progressively less effective.
BARRY COMMONER

Air Epa Method Progress
The most meaningful engine of change, powerful enough to confront corporate power, may be not so much environmental quality, as the economic development and growth associated with the effort to improve it.
BARRY COMMONER

Environmental Meaningful Powerful Quality
In certain ways, I’m not very different than I was when I was a teenager.
BARRY COMMONER

Different Teenager Way
The first law of ecology is that everything is related to everything else.
BARRY COMMONER

Animal Law Nature
When you fully understand the situation, it is worse than you think.
BARRY COMMONER

Environmental Thinking Understanding
Air pollution is not merely a nuisance and a threat to health. It is a reminder that our most celebrated technological achievements-the automobile, the jet plane, the power plant, industry in general, and indeed the modern city itself-are, in the environment, failures.
BARRY COMMONER

Achievement Air Cities
Recycling is a good thing to do. It makes people feel good to do it. The thing I want to emphasize is the vast difference between recycling for the purpose of feeling good and recycling for the purpose of solving the trash problem.
BARRY COMMONER

Differences Feel Good People
The AEC scientists were so narrowly focused on arming the United States for nuclear war that they failed to perceive facts – even widely known ones – that were outside their limited field of vision.
BARRY COMMONER

Facts Vision War
If environmentalism is a fad, it will be the last one.
BARRY COMMONER

Environment Fads Lasts
If you can see the light at the end of the tunnel, you are looking the wrong way.
BARRY COMMONER

Light Tunnels Way
In every case, the environmental hazards were made known only by independent scientists, who were often bitterly opposed by the corporations responsible for the hazards.
BARRY COMMONER

Environmental Hazards Independent

My entry into the environmental arena was through the issue that so dramatically – and destructively – demonstrates the link between science and social action: nuclear weapons.

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My entry into the environmental arena was through the issue that so dramatically – and destructively – demonstrates the link between science and social action: nuclear weapons.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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