Barry Commoner Quotes

Unless we practice conservation, those who come after us will have to pay the price of misery, degradation, and failure for the progress and prosperity of our day.

You can print money to bail out a bank, but you can't print life to bail out a planet.

For centuries, building materials were free. You want to build a house, you cut down some trees. But we haven't been thinking about the cost to the planet.

The natural capital is not income, but we spend our natural capital as if it were revenue, as if it were going to come back next year without any problems, whereas these renewals in nature can take hundreds of years.

We need what I have often called an ecological approach to the management of these resources and we do not have that now. We have the inertia of past habits, unsustainable habits.

The idea of a non-growing economy may be an anathema to an economist. But the idea of a continually growing economy is an anathema to an ecologist.

People are beginning to realize that we need to live in accordance with the law of ecology, the law of finite resources, and if we don't, we're going to go extinct.

To waste, to destroy, our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the land instead of using it so as to increase its usefulness, will result in undermining in the days of our children the very prosperity which we ought by right to hand down to them amplified and developed.

The fruits [game and natural resources] may be easier tasted than believed.

We're at peak oil, peak water, peak resources, and so either we figure it out and let science lead or we head down a very bad, dark trail to where a lot of people aren't going to make it.

I'm pessimistic about the future of the planet. These big guys don't realize for everything they do, there's a reaction. You have to pay. That's karma.

If you narrow the playing field, the next generation has less to put out, to eat and regenerate from.

I believe that the great Creator has put ores and oil on this Earth to give us a breathing spell ... as we exhaust them, we must be prepared to fall back on our farms, which are God's true storehouse. We can learn to synthesize materials for every human need from things that grow.

All our efforts to defeat poverty and pursue sustainable development will be in vain if environmental degradation and natural resource depletion continue unabated.

We are grossly wasting our energy resources and other precious raw materials as though their supply were infinite. We must even face the prospect of changing our basic ways of living. This change will either be made on our own initiative in a planned and rational way, or forced on us with chaos and suffering by the inexorable laws of nature.

Nature holds an immense uncollected debt over every man's head.

Sustainability is living on nature's income rather than living on its capital.

It seems an easy choice - sacrifice the tree for a human life - until one learns that three trees must be destroyed for each patient treated. Suddenly we must confront some tough questions. How important are the medical needs of future generations?

We're adding a billion people every decade. We're just spin doctors. Whatever we do is supposedly great, and yet it's always at the expense of diversity and nature. We're like elephants. The ecology of the elephant is more similar to human than any other.

Water is our most precious resource, but we waste it, just as we waste other resources, including oil and gas.

Fuel conservation is a necessity, and I have to be the first person to set the example.

Nature provides a free lunch, but only if we control our appetites.

If the world is presented as resources to be exploited, then, more than likely, you're going to exploit the world.

I think the greatest challenge in environmentalism and the most rewarding challenge is trying to figure out how humans can meet their needs while protecting the environment.

I haven't inherited the earth from my parents, I am borrowing it from my children.