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

Categorized in : Long Effort Ecosystems

Everything is connected to everything else.

Barry Commoner

connected

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

Barry Commoner

pollution environmental disease

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

Barry Commoner

earth-day environmental use

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

Barry Commoner

nature law animal

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

technology powerful men

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

Barry Commoner

environment lunch nature

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

agriculture energy answers

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

Barry Commoner

tunnels light way

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 generations technology

Nothing ever dies, nothing ever goes away.

Barry Commoner

information advice

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

Barry Commoner

fads lasts ifs

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

agriculture sick people

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

achievement cities air

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

technology land water

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

Barry Commoner

clean known technology

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

environmental affluence facts

Sooner or later,

Barry Commoner

environment natural pay

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

Barry Commoner

environmental war years

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

Barry Commoner

medicine law art

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

Barry Commoner

approach zero impossible