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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.

Barry Commoner

Policy

Interest

Labor

The wave of new productive enterprises would provide opportunities to remedy the unjust distribution of environmental hazards among economic classes and racial and ethnic communities.

Barry Commoner

Environmental

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.

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.

The weapons were conceived and created by a small band of physicists and chemists; they remain a cataclysmic threat to the whole of human society and the natural environment.

No action is without its side effects.

Barry Commoner

Action

The first law of ecology is that everything is related to everything else.

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.

Earth Day 1970 was irrefutable evidence that the American people understood the environmental threat and wanted action to resolve it.

Environmental concern is now firmly embedded in public life: in education, medicine and law; in journalism, literature and art.

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 Commoner

Environmental

Quality

If you can see the light at the end of the tunnel, you are looking the wrong way.

In every case, the environmental hazards were made known only by independent scientists, who were often bitterly opposed by the corporations responsible for the hazards.

By adopting the control strategy, the nation's environmental program has created a built-in antagonism between environmental quality and economic growth.

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.