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 COMMONERWhen you fully understand the situation, it is worse than you think.
More Barry Commoner Quotes
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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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In nature, no organic substance is synthesized unless there is provision for its degradation; recycling is enforced.
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World War II had a very important impact on the development of technology, as a whole.
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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.
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If environmentalism is a fad, it will be the last one.
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Sooner or later, wittingly or unwittingly, we must pay for every intrusion on the natural environment.
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The proper use of science is not to conquer nature but to live in it.
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When you fully understand the situation, it is worse than you think.
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In certain ways, I’m not very different than I was when I was a teenager.
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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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The modern technologist is less ‘sorcerer’ and more ‘sorcerer’s apprentice’.
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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.
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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.
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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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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






