What is needed now is a transformation of the major systems of production more profound than even the sweeping post-World War II changes in production technology.
BARRY COMMONERWorld War II had a very important impact on the development of technology, as a whole.
More Barry Commoner Quotes
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If you ask what you are going to do about global warming, the only rational answer is to change the way in which we do transportation, energy production, agriculture and a good deal of manufacturing. The problem originates in human activity in the form of the production of goods.
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The modern technologist is less ‘sorcerer’ and more ‘sorcerer’s apprentice’.
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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.
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If you can see the light at the end of the tunnel, you are looking the wrong way.
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All of the clean technologies are known, it’s a question of simply applying them.
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The environmental crisis arises from a fundamental fault: our systems of production – in industry, agriculture, energy and transportation – essential as they are, make people sick and die.
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The environmental crisis is a global problem, and only global action will resolve it.
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No action is without its side effects.
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In general, any productive activity which introduces substances foreign to the natural environment runs a considerable risk of polluting it.
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Everything is connected to everything else.
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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.
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Environmental quality was drastically improved while economic activity grew by the simple expedient of removing lead from gasoline – which prevented it from entering the environment.
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Nothing ever dies, nothing ever goes away.
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The AEC had at its command an army of highly skilled scientists.
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The environmental crisis is a signal of this approaching catastrophe.
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Sooner or later, wittingly or unwittingly, we must pay for every intrusion on the natural environment.
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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.
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The gap between brute power and human need continues to grow, as the power fattens on the same faulty technology that intensifies the need.
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The first law of ecology is that everything is related to everything else.
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Finally, since human beings are uniquely capable of producing materials not found in nature, environmental degradation may be due to the resultant intrusion into an ecosystem of a substance wholly foreign to it.
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In nature, no organic substance is synthesized unless there is provision for its degradation; recycling is enforced.
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Seen that way, the wholesale transformation of production technologies that is mandated by pollution prevention creates a new surge of economic development.
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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.
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Environmental concern is now firmly embedded in public life: in education, medicine and law; in journalism, literature and art.
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The modern assault on the environment began about 50 years ago, during and immediately after World War II.
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Science is triumphant with far-ranging success, but its triumph is somehow clouded by growing difficulties in providing for the simple necessities of human life on earth.
BARRY COMMONER