Barry Commoner (1917 - 2012) was a cellular biologist, medical researcher, university professor, soldier, economist, radical ecologist and anarchists.
Ideas
Most of his work was focused on how we can redesign the economy to be more in line with natural ecosystems and reduce our impact on the biosphere.
Four Laws of Ecology
In 1971, he argued that the economy should be restructured around the unbending laws of ecology which are as follows:
- Everything is connected to everything else. There is one ecosphere for all living organisms and what affects one, affects all.
- Everything must go somewhere. There is no "waste" in nature and there is no "away" to which things can be thrown.
- Nature knows best. Humankind has fashioned technology to improve upon nature, but such change in a natural system is likely to be detrimental to that system.
- There is no such thing as a free lunch. Exploitation of nature will inevitably involve the conversion of resources from useful to useless forms.
Three E's
In 1976, he argued that the three main ills plaguing our society were the environment, energy and the economy. These were all interconnected issues, the industries that use the most energy have the most negative impact on the environment, and the use of scarce fossil fuels means that prices will be pushed up as more energy is used, hurting the economy.
Quotes
"Everything is connected to everything else."
"Environmental pollution is an incurable disease. It can only be prevented."
"The proper use of science is not to conquer nature but to live with it."
"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?"
"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."
"If you can see the light at the end of the tunnel, you are looking the wrong 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."
"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."
"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."
"Nothing ever dies, nothing ever goes away."
"If environmentalism is a fad, it will be the last one."
"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."
"All of the clean technologies are known, it's a question of simply applying them."
"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."
"Sooner or later, wittingly or unwittingly, we must pay, for every intrusion on the natural environment."
"The modern assault on the environment began about 50 years ago, during and immediately after World War II."
"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."
"Environmental concern is now firmly embedded in public life: in education, medicine and law; in journalism, literature and art."
"It is simply economically impossible to require controls that even approach zero emissions."
"World War II had a very important impact on the development of technology, as a whole."
"When you fully understand the situation, it is worse than you think."
"After all, despite the economic advantage to firms that employed child labor, it was in the social interest, as a national policy, to abolish it - removing that advantage for all firms."
"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."