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.

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.

Nothing ever goes away.

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.

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.

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.

It reflects a prevailing myth that production technology is no more amenable to human judgment or social interests than the laws of thermodynamics, atomic structure or biological inheritance.

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

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

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

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.

Seen that way, the wholesale transformation of production technologies that is mandated by pollution prevention creates a new surge of economic development.

The AEC had at its command an army of highly skilled scientists.

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.

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.

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.

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

The modern assault on the environment began about 50 years ago, during and immediately after World War II.

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.

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.

It is simply economically impossible to require controls that even approach zero emissions.

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.

When you fully understand the situation, it is worse than you think.

The environmental crisis is a global problem, and only global action will resolve it.

The methods that EPA introduced after 1970 to reduce air-pollutant emissions worked for a while, but over time have become progressively less effective.

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.

Environmental pollution is an incurable disease. It can only be prevented.

I see no reason to have my shirts ironed. It's irrational.

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.

Nature knows best.

The age of innocent faith in science and technology may be over.

The real abhorrent consequence of the invention of atomic bombs is the fact that we still have them and they're spreading.

There is no such thing as a free lunch.

What I have experienced over time is that environmental problems are easier to deal with in ways that don't go into their interconnections to the rest of what we are.

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.

The environmental crisis is a global problem and only global action will resolve it.

The proper use of science is not to conquer nature but to live in 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.

The environmental crisis is a signal of this approaching catastrophe.

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.

Recycling is a good thing to do. It makes people feel good to do it. The thing I want to emphasize is the vast difference between recycling for the purpose of feeling good and recycling for the purpose of solving the trash problem.

We carry a new world here, in our hearts. That world is growing this minute.

People generally don't recognize how long it takes to conceive, publish, and write a book.

My favorite songwriting trick is writing something like 'XO.' In my brain, I thought, 'This is probably going to be a love song. How can I change that and find ways to twist that.' As a songwriter, it's your job for the song to take twists and turns that people don't expect.

Perseverance and tact are the two great qualities most valuable for all those who would climb, but especially for those who have to step out of the crowd.

The United States owes a great debt to its inventors. Far from being grateful to them, it places every obstruction in their way and makes it enormously difficult to secure a patent.