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.

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.

No action is without its side effects.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

Nothing ever goes away.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.