Quotes from 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.

Everything is connected to everything else. Everything must go somewhere. Nature knows best. There is no such thing as a free lunch.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

The methods that EPA introduced after 1970 to reduce air-pollutant emissions worked for a while, but over time have become progressively less effective.

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

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

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