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.
Barry CommonerRead
By adopting the control strategy, the nation's environmental program has created a built-in antagonism between environmental quality and economic growth.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the conflict between environmental preservation and economic development.
Barry Commoner suggests that when a nation prioritizes control strategies in its environmental policy, it inherently creates a tension between the goals of improving environmental quality and pursuing economic growth. This statement reflects a fundamental debate regarding the balance between ecological sustainability and industrial expansion, indicating that these two objectives may often be at odds with each other.
In practice
In a speech on sustainability, this quote could be used to illustrate the challenges faced by policymakers.
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.
We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation.
The first law of ecology is that everything is related to everything else.
What is new is that environmentalism intensely illuminates the need to confront the corporate domain at its most powerful and guarded point - the exclusive right to govern the systems of production.
Despite the dazzling successes of modern technology and the unprecedented power of modern military systems, they suffer from a common and catastrophic fault. While providing us with a bountiful supply of food, with great industrial plants, with high-speed transportation, and with military weapons of unprecedented power, they threaten our very survival.
Sooner or later, _x000D_ wittingly or unwittingly, _x000D_ we must pay _x000D_ for every intrusion _x000D_ on the natural environment.
Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall.
Science may provide the most useful way to organize empirical, reproducible data, but its power to do so is predicated on its inability to grasp the most central aspects of human life: hope, fear, love, hate, beauty, envy, honor, weakness, striving, suffering, virtue.
Thus every action must be due to one or other of seven causes: chance, nature, compulsion, habit, reasoning, anger, or appetite.
For the United States to recommit itself to the obligation that we undertook in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty that many other states undertook, which was to work towards disarmament and the eventual elimination of nuclear weapons, is something that manifestly serves our national security interests.
To think that before the hills were formed, or the channels of the sea were scooped out, God loved me; that from everlasting to everlasting His mercy is upon His people. Is not that a consolation?
There is a tendency to seek an objective account of everything before admitting its reality.
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