All of the clean technologies are known, it’s a question of simply applying them.
When you fully understand the situation, it is worse than you think.
Environmental concern is now firmly embedded in public life: in education, medicine and law; in journalism, literature and art.
The age of innocent faith in science and technology may be over.
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.
No action is without its side effects.
Technologists practice faith too; ‘Faith that problems have solutions before having the knowledge to solve them.’
Nothing can survive on the planet unless it is a cooperative part of larger global life.
The environmental crisis is a signal of this approaching catastrophe.
If environmentalism is a fad, it will be the last one.
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.
The environmental crisis is a global problem, and only global action will resolve it.
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.
Seen that way, the wholesale transformation of production technologies that is mandated by pollution prevention creates a new surge of economic development.
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.
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 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.
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.