Barry Commoner Quotes

#1. 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

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

Barry Commoner

#3. Finally, since human beings are uniquely capable of producing materials not found in nature, environmental degradation may be due to the resultant intrusion into an ecosystem of a substance wholly foreign to it.

Barry Commoner

#4. 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

#5. The favorite statistic is that the U.S. contains 6 to 7% of the world population but consumes more than half the world's resources and is responsible for that fraction of the total environmental pollution. But this statistic hides another vital fact: that not everyone in the U.S. is so affluent.

Barry Commoner

#6. 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

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

Barry Commoner

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

Barry Commoner

#9. Air pollution is not merely a nuisance and a threat to health. It is a reminder that our most celebrated technological achievements-the automobile, the jet plane, the power plant, industry in general, and indeed the modern city itself-are, in the environment, failures.

Barry Commoner

#10. Sooner or later,
wittingly or unwittingly,
we must pay
for every intrusion
on the natural environment.

Barry Commoner

#11. The modern technologist is less 'sorcerer' and more 'sorcerer's apprentice'.

Barry Commoner

#12. The proper use of science is not to conquer nature but to live in it.

Barry Commoner

#13. Nothing can survive on the planet unless it is a cooperative part of larger global life.

Barry Commoner

#14. 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

#15. Science is triumphant with far-ranging success, but its triumph is somehow clouded by growing difficulties in providing for the simple necessities of human life on earth.

Barry Commoner

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

Barry Commoner

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

Barry Commoner

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

Barry Commoner

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

Barry Commoner

#20. 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

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

Barry Commoner

#22. 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.

Barry Commoner

#23. 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.

Barry Commoner

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

Barry Commoner

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

Barry Commoner

#26. 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

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

Barry Commoner

#28. 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

#29. 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

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

Barry Commoner

#31. In general, any productive activity which introduces substances foreign to the natural environment runs a considerable risk of polluting it.

Barry Commoner

#32. 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

#33. For that reason the simple test of the slogan 'Consume Less' as a basis for social action on the environment would be to tell it to the blacks in the ghetto. The message will not be very well received for there are many people in this country who consume less than is needed to sustain a decent life.

Barry Commoner

#34. 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

#35. 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

#36. 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

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

Barry Commoner

#38. 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

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

Barry Commoner

#40. If environmentalism is a fad, it will be the last one.

Barry Commoner

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

Barry Commoner

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

Barry Commoner

#43. 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

#44. In nature, no organic substance is synthesized unless there is provision for its degradation; recycling is enforced.

Barry Commoner

#45. 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

#46. 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

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

Barry Commoner

#48. Technologists practice faith too; 'Faith that problems have solutions before having the knowledge to solve them.'

Barry Commoner

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

Barry Commoner

#50. 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

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

Barry Commoner

#52. 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

#53. No action is without its side effects.

Barry Commoner

#54. The environmental crisis is a signal of this approaching catastrophe.

Barry Commoner

#55. Nothing ever goes away.

Barry Commoner

#56. 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