Barry Commoner
Barry Commoner
Barry Commonerwas an American biologist, college professor, and politician. He was a leading ecologist and among the founders of the modern environmental movement. He ran for president of the United States in the 1980 U.S. presidential election on the Citizens Party ticket. He served as editor of Science Illustrated magazine...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth28 May 1917
CountryUnited States of America
Barry Commoner quotes about
advice information
Nothing ever goes away.
technology land water
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.
powerful technology men
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?
environmental disease pollution
Environmental pollution is an incurable disease. It can only be prevented.
technology environmental generations
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.
earth-day use conquer
The proper use of science is not to conquer nature but to live in it.
nature law firsts
The first law of ecology is that everything is related to everything else.
connected
Everything is connected to everything else,
american-scientist education interests labor major national policies social
There is nothing new about national policies on major social interests such as education or labor - or, for that matter, the environment.
abhorrent atomic bombs fact invention
The real abhorrent consequence of the invention of atomic bombs is the fact that we still have them and they're spreading.
major vehicles
The major source of photochemical smog - petroleum-fueled vehicles - can be replaced by emission-free electric vehicles.
american-scientist conceived created human natural physicists remain society threat weapons
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.
believe solve
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.