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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.

Barry Commoner

It reflects a prevailing myth that production technology is no more amenable to human judgment or social interests than the laws of thermodynamics, atomic structure or biological inheritance.
BARRY COMMONER

Inheritance Law Technology
We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation.
BARRY COMMONER

Earth Day Environmental Survival
The first law of ecology is that everything is related to everything else.
BARRY COMMONER

Animal Law Nature
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
I see no reason to have my shirts ironed. It’s irrational.
BARRY COMMONER

Irrational Reason Shirts
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
In nature, no organic substance is synthesized unless there is provision for its degradation; recycling is enforced.
BARRY COMMONER

Degradation Recycling Substance
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
In certain ways, I’m not very different than I was when I was a teenager.
BARRY COMMONER

Different Teenager Way
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
Nothing ever dies, nothing ever goes away.
BARRY COMMONER

Advice Die Information
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.
BARRY COMMONER

Degradation Ecosystems Environmental
Technologists practice faith too; ‘Faith that problems have solutions before having the knowledge to solve them.’
BARRY COMMONER

Practice Problem Solve
World War II had a very important impact on the development of technology, as a whole.
BARRY COMMONER

Impact Technology War
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.
BARRY COMMONER

Agriculture Answers Energy
It is simply economically impossible to require controls that even approach zero emissions.
BARRY COMMONER

Approach Impossible Zero

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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Barry Commoner Quotes