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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.

Barry Commoner

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
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.
BARRY COMMONER

Entering Environmental Quality Simple
Nothing ever dies, nothing ever goes away.
BARRY COMMONER

Advice Die Information
The age of innocent faith in science and technology may be over.
BARRY COMMONER

Age May Technology
If environmentalism is a fad, it will be the last one.
BARRY COMMONER

Environment Fads Lasts
Environmental concern is now firmly embedded in public life: in education, medicine and law; in journalism, literature and art.
BARRY COMMONER

Art Law Medicine
Everything is connected to everything else.
BARRY COMMONER

Connected Else Everything
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
In general, any productive activity which introduces substances foreign to the natural environment runs a considerable risk of polluting it.
BARRY COMMONER

Environmental Risk Running
Everything is connected to everything else. Everything must go somewhere. Nature knows best. There is no such thing as a free lunch.
BARRY COMMONER

Environment Lunch Nature
It is simply economically impossible to require controls that even approach zero emissions.
BARRY COMMONER

Approach Impossible Zero
No action is without its side effects.
BARRY COMMONER

Action Effect Sides
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
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
Earth Day 1970 was irrefutable evidence that the American people understood the environmental threat and wanted action to resolve it.
BARRY COMMONER

Day Earth Firefighter People
The gap between brute power and human need continues to grow, as the power fattens on the same faulty technology that intensifies the need.
BARRY COMMONER

Gaps Needs Technology
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.
BARRY COMMONER

Facts Vision War
The environmental crisis is a global problem, and only global action will resolve it.
BARRY COMMONER

Action Environmental Problem
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
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
Environmental pollution is an incurable disease. It can only be prevented.
BARRY COMMONER

Disease Environmental Pollution
Nothing can survive on the planet unless it is a cooperative part of larger global life.
BARRY COMMONER

Cooperatives Global Larger Planets
In certain ways, I’m not very different than I was when I was a teenager.
BARRY COMMONER

Different Teenager Way
Technologists practice faith too; ‘Faith that problems have solutions before having the knowledge to solve them.’
BARRY COMMONER

Practice Problem Solve
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
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 COMMONER

Profound Technology War
The first law of ecology is that everything is related to everything else.—->I dont believe in environmentalism as the solution to anything. What I believe is that environmentalism illuminates the things that need to be done to solve all of the problems together.
BARRY COMMONER

Believe Environmentalism Law Together

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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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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