By adopting the control strategy, the nation's environmental program has created a built-in antagonism between environmental quality and economic growth.
Barry CommonerRead
We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the urgent environmental crisis that endangers humanity's existence.
Barry Commoner's quote highlights the critical state of our environment, suggesting that ongoing ecological degradation poses a significant threat not only to national well-being but to global habitability. It calls for immediate attention to the environmental issues we face, underscoring their potential consequences on humanity's future.
In practice
In a speech about climate change, I would highlight Barry Commoner's quote to emphasize the urgency of our actions.
By adopting the control strategy, the nation's environmental program has created a built-in antagonism between environmental quality and economic growth.
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.
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.
Down the hill I went, and then, I forgot the ways of men, For night-scents, heady and damp and cool Wakened ecstasy
The soil of their native land is dear to all the hearts of mankind.
At two o'clock in the morning, if you open your window and listen, You will hear the feet of the Wind that is going to call the sun. And the trees in the Shadow rustle and the trees in the moonlight glisten, And though it is deep, dark night, you feel that the night is done.
Forests are the lungs of our land.
The industrial processes in use today were developed at a time when no one had to consider what the environmental impact was. Who cared? But making ecological concerns matter to a company's bottom line will help it do the research and development that will reinvent everything we buy.
Now, more than ever, we need nature as a balancing agent.
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