Barry Commoner Quotes

Because we're not in harmony with the environment, we're destroying the environment that supports us.

The human juggernaut is permanently eroding Earth's ancient biosphere.

I will be very sad when global warming and toxins kill off all the toads and frogs and salamanders. Here's hoping we, as humans, figure out a way to be less stupid.

To be modern is to destroy nature.

We humans are the greatest of earth's parasites.

I'm a radical environmentalist; I think the sooner we asphyxiate in our own filth, the better. The world will do better without us. Maybe some fuzzy animals will go with us, but there'll be plenty of other animals, and they'll be back.

Human civilization has been changing the Earth's environment for millennia, often to our detriment. Dams, deforestation and urbanization can alter water cycles and wind patterns, occasionally triggering droughts or even creating deserts.

The world has been experiencing a whole pattern of auto-destruction, whether in environmental disasters like Chernobyl or health disasters like AIDS.

Water and air, the two essential fluids on which all life depends, have become global garbage cans.

Nature stopped being natural decades ago.

There is hardly a place on Earth where people do not log, pave, spray, drain, flood, graze, fish, plow, burn, drill, spill or dump. There is no life zone, with the possible exception of the deep ocean, that we are not degrading.

The causal chain of the deterioration (of the environment) is easily followed to its source. Too many cars, too many factories, too much detergent, too much pesticide, multiplying contrails, inadequate sewage treatment plants, too little water, too much carbon dioxide---all can be traced easily to too many people.

We have killed off nature, that world entirely independent of us which was here before we arrived and which encircled and supported our human society

Your armed struggles for profit Have left collars of waste upon My shore,, Currents of debris upon my breast.

Nature does not have the capacity to heal all the wounds that have been inflicted upon it by mankind.

Only when the last tree has withered, and the last fish caught, and the last river been poisoned, will we realize we cannot eat money.

Strip mining is man’s thorough and total assault upon his planet.

God gave us the earth. We have dominion over the plants, the animals, the seas…. God said “Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it. It’s yours.”

We are introducing compounds into the environment that did not exist only a few decades ago.

Many of the environmental rules not only fail to protect the natural environment, they actually increase the damage.

I look at it this way... For centuries now, man has done everything he can to destroy, defile, and interfere with nature: clear-cutting forests, strip-mining mountains, poisoning the atmosphere, over-fishing the oceans, polluting the rivers and lakes, destroying wetlands and aquifers... so when nature strikes back, and smacks him on the head and kicks him in the nuts, I enjoy that. I have absolutely no sympathy for human beings whatsoever. None. And no matter what kind of problem humans are facing, whether it's natural or man-made, I always hope it gets worse.

Resource extraction impacts a global environment that is increasingly at severe risk.

Eventually we'll realize that if we destroy the ecosystem, we destroy ourselves.

What a strange creature man is that he fouls his own nest.

I don’t know if it is all (man’s fault) but the majority is, for the most part, it is man who continuously slaps down nature.