Quotes By Barry Commoner

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

World War II had a very important impact on the development of technology, as a whole.

There is no such thing as a free lunch.

Nothing ever goes away.

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

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.

It is simply economically impossible to require controls that even approach zero emissions.

The major source of photochemical smog - petroleum-fueled vehicles - can be replaced by emission-free electric vehicles.

The AEC had at its command an army of highly skilled scientists.

The weapons were conceived and created by a small band of physicists and chemists; they remain a cataclysmic threat to the whole of human society and the natural environment.

Environmental pollution is an incurable disease. It can only be prevented.

What I have experienced over time is that environmental problems are easier to deal with in ways that don't go into their interconnections to the rest of what we are.

The methods that EPA introduced after 1970 to reduce air-pollutant emissions worked for a while, but over time have become progressively less effective.

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.

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.

The first law of ecology is that everything is related to everything else.

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.

By adopting the control strategy, the nation's environmental program has created a built-in antagonism between environmental quality and economic growth.

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.

After 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.

The age of innocent faith in science and technology may be over.

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.

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.

When you fully understand the situation, it is worse than you think.

All of the clean technologies are known, it's a question of simply applying them.

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

I see no reason to have my shirts ironed. It's irrational.

Nature knows best.

In every case, the environmental hazards were made known only by independent scientists, who were often bitterly opposed by the corporations responsible for the hazards.

In certain ways, I'm not very different than I was when I was a teenager.