Barry Commoner Quotes About Pollution

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

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  Barry Commoner

  Interview with Alan Hall, www.scientificamerican.com. June 23, 1997.

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

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  Barry Commoner

  "At 90, an Environmentalist From the '70s Still Has Hope". Interview With Thomas Vinciguerra, www.nytimes.com. June 19, 2007.

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• In general, any productive activity which introduces substances foreign to the natural environment runs a considerable risk of polluting it.

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  Barry Commoner

  Barry Commoner (2014). “The Closing Circle: Nature, Man, and Technology”, p.122, Knopf

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• 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.

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  Barry Commoner

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• 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.

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  Barry Commoner

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• Finally, since human beings are uniquely capable of producing materials not found in nature, environmental degradation may be due to the resultant intrusion into an ecosystem of a substance wholly foreign to it.

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  Barry Commoner

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• Perhaps the simplest example is a synthetic plastic, which unlike natural materials, is not degraded by biological decay. It therefore persists as rubbish or is burned-in both cases causing pollution. In the same way, a substance such as DDT or lead, which plays no role in the chemistry of life and interferes with the actions of substances that do, is bound to cause ecological damage if sufficiently concentrated.

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  Barry Commoner

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