Barry Commoner Quotes & Sayings

The environmental crisis is a signal of this approaching catastrophe. — 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

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

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

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 us with a bountiful supply of food, with great industrial plants, with high-speed transportation, and with military weapons of unprecedented power, they threaten our very survival. — Barry Commoner

Perhaps one of the most meaningful ways to sense the impact of the environmental crisis is to confront the question which is always asked about Lake Erie: how can we restore it? I believe the only valid answer is that no one knows. For it should be clear that even if overnight all of the pollutants now pouring into Lake Erie were stopped, there would still remain the problem of the accumulated mass of pollutants in the lake bottom. — Barry Commoner

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

Because the global ecosystem is a connected whole, in which nothing can be gained or lost and which is not subject to over-all improvement, anything extracted from it by human effort must be replaced. Payment of this price cannot be avoided; it can only be delayed. The present environmental crisis is a warning that we have delayed nearly too long. — Barry Commoner

Perhaps the simplest example is a synthetic plastic, which unlike natural materials, is not degraded by biological decay. It therefore persists as rubbish or is burned-in both cases causing pollution. In the same way, a substance such as DDT or lead, which plays no role in the chemistry of life and interferes with the actions of substances that do, is bound to cause ecological damage if sufficiently concentrated. — Barry Commoner

Sooner or later,
wittingly or unwittingly,
we must pay
for every intrusion
on the natural environment. — Barry Commoner

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

Nothing can survive on the planet unless it is a cooperative part of larger global life. — Barry Commoner

The modern technologist is less 'sorcerer' and more 'sorcerer's apprentice'. — Barry Commoner

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

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

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

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

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

The environmental crisis is somber evidence of an insidious fraud hidden in the vaunted productivity and wealth of modern, technology-based society. This wealth has been gained by rapid short-term exploitation of the environmental system, but it has blindly accumulated a debt to nature-a debt so large and so pervasive that in the next generation it may, if unpaid, wipe out most of the wealth it has gained us. — Barry Commoner

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

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

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

The proper use of science is not to conquer nature but to live in it. — Barry Commoner

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

No action is without its side effects. — Barry Commoner

Our assaults on the ecosystem are so powerful, so numerous, so finely interconnected, that although the damage they do is clear, it is very difficult to discover how it was done. By which weapon? In whose hand? Are we driving the ecosphere to destruction simply by our growing numbers? By our greedy accumulation of wealth? Or are the machines which we have built to gain this wealth-the magnificent technology that now feeds us out of neat packages, that clothes us in man-made fibers, that surrounds us with new chemical creations-at fault? — Barry Commoner

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nothing ever goes away. — Barry Commoner

If environmentalism is a fad, it will be the last one. — Barry Commoner

What the new fertilizer technology has accomplished for the farmer is clear: more crop can be produced on less acreage than before. Since the cost of fertilizer, relative to the resultant gain in crop sales, is lower than that of any other economic input, and since the Land Bank pays the farmer for acreage not in crops, the new technology pays him well. The cost-in environmental degradation-is borne by his neighbors in town who find their water polluted. The new technology is an economic success-but only because it is an ecological failure. — Barry Commoner

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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