Barry Commoner quotes

If you can see the light at the end of the tunnel, you are looking the wrong way. (Barry Commoner)
The first law of ecology is that everything is related to everything else.
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
Environmental pollution is an incurable disease. It can only be prevented.
Barry Commoner
The environmental crisis is a global problem, and only global action will resolve it.
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
When you fully understand the situation, it is worse than you think.
Barry Commoner
Environmental concern is now firmly embedded in public life: in education, medicine and law; in journalism, literature and art.
Barry Commoner
It is simply economically impossible to require controls that even approach zero emissions.
Barry Commoner
The modern assault on the environment began about 50 years ago, during and immediately after World War II.
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)
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 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
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
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
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
No action is without its side effects.
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
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 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)
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
By adopting the control strategy, the nation's environmental program has created a built-in antagonism between environmental quality and economic growth.
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
Earth Day 1970 was irrefutable evidence that the American people understood the environmental threat and wanted action to resolve it.
Barry Commoner