Barry Commoner Quotes

50 quotes in 786 categories

• The proper use of science is not to conquer nature but to live in it.
• Despite the dazzling successes of modern technology and the unprecedented power of modern military systems, they suffer from a common and catastrophic fault. While providing…
• What is new is that environmentalism intensely illuminates the need to confront the corporate domain at its most powerful and guarded point - the exclusive…
• When you fully understand the situation, it is worse than you think.
• 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…
• Everything is connected to everything else. Everything must go somewhere. Nature knows best. There is no such thing as a free lunch. If you don't…
• We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation.
• 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.
• 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…
• By adopting the control strategy, the nation's environmental program has created a built-in antagonism between environmental quality and economic growth.
• 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…
• Environmental quality was drastically improved while economic activity grew by the simple expedient of removing lead from gasoline - which prevented it from entering the…
• My entry into the environmental arena was through the issue that so dramatically - and destructively - demonstrates the link between science and social action:…
• 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…
• In nature, no organic substance is synthesized unless there is provision for its degradation; recycling is enforced.
• 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…
• Seen that way, the wholesale transformation of production technologies that is mandated by pollution prevention creates a new surge of economic development.
• 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…
• The environmental crisis is a global problem, and only global action will resolve it.
• Nothing ever goes away.

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