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If environmentalism is a fad, it will be the last one.

Barry Commoner

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
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

Environmental Issues Links
The modern assault on the environment began about 50 years ago, during and immediately after World War II.
BARRY COMMONER

Environmental War Years
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 age of innocent faith in science and technology may be over.
BARRY COMMONER

Age May Technology
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
Seen that way, the wholesale transformation of production technologies that is mandated by pollution prevention creates a new surge of economic development.
BARRY COMMONER

Development Prevention Technology
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
I see no reason to have my shirts ironed. It’s irrational.
BARRY COMMONER

Irrational Reason Shirts
The AEC had at its command an army of highly skilled scientists.
BARRY COMMONER

Army Command Scientist
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.
BARRY COMMONER

Agriculture People Sick
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
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
If you can see the light at the end of the tunnel, you are looking the wrong way.
BARRY COMMONER

Light Tunnels Way
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
All of the clean technologies are known, it’s a question of simply applying them.
BARRY COMMONER

Clean Known Technology

If environmentalism is a fad, it will be the last one.

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If environmentalism is a fad, it will be the last one.

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