Quotes By Barry Commoner
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.
Barry Commoner
The real abhorrent consequence of the invention of atomic bombs is the fact that we still have them and they're spreading.
Barry Commoner
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
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
By adopting the control strategy, the nation's environmental program has created a built-in antagonism between environmental quality and economic growth.
Barry Commoner
I don't 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
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
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
Seen that way, the wholesale transformation of production technologies that is mandated by pollution prevention creates a new surge of economic development.
Barry Commoner
The modern assault on the environment began about 50 years ago, during and immediately after World War II.
Barry Commoner
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.
Barry Commoner
It is simply economically impossible to require controls that even approach zero emissions.
Barry Commoner
The major source of photochemical smog - petroleum-fueled vehicles - can be replaced by emission-free electric vehicles.
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
Earth Day 1970 was irrefutable evidence that the American people understood the environmental threat and wanted action to resolve it.
Barry Commoner
The wave of new productive enterprises would provide opportunities to remedy the unjust distribution of environmental hazards among economic classes and racial and ethnic communities.
Barry Commoner
The methods that EPA introduced after 1970 to reduce air-pollutant emissions worked for a while, but over time have become progressively less effective.
Barry Commoner
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
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