Quotes By 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.

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.

Nature knows best.

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

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.

The real abhorrent consequence of the invention of atomic bombs is the fact that we still have them and they're spreading.

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.

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

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.

If you can see the light at the end of the tunnel, you are looking the wrong way.

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.

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.

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.

No action is without its side effects.

The environmental crisis is a global problem, and only global action will resolve it.

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

There is no such thing as a free lunch.

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

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.