In nature, no organic substance is synthesized unless there is provision for its degradation; recycling is enforced.
BARRY COMMONERIn nature, no organic substance is synthesized unless there is provision for its degradation; recycling is enforced.
BARRY COMMONERIt 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 COMMONERThe 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 COMMONERThe environmental crisis is a signal of this approaching catastrophe.
BARRY COMMONERThe age of innocent faith in science and technology may be over.
BARRY COMMONERThe methods that EPA introduced after 1970 to reduce air-pollutant emissions worked for a while, but over time have become progressively less effective.
BARRY COMMONERAfter all, despite the economic advantage to firms that employed child labor, it was in the social interest, as a national policy, to abolish it – removing that advantage for all firms.
BARRY COMMONERThe 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 COMMONERWhen you fully understand the situation, it is worse than you think.
BARRY COMMONERThe modern technologist is less ‘sorcerer’ and more ‘sorcerer’s apprentice’.
BARRY COMMONERTechnologists practice faith too; ‘Faith that problems have solutions before having the knowledge to solve them.’
BARRY COMMONERFinally, 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 COMMONERWe are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation.
BARRY COMMONERSooner or later, wittingly or unwittingly, we must pay for every intrusion on the natural environment.
BARRY COMMONERNothing can survive on the planet unless it is a cooperative part of larger global life.
BARRY COMMONERIf environmentalism is a fad, it will be the last one.
BARRY COMMONER