Barry Commoner's Quotes

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

There is no such thing as a free lunch.

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.

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 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.