Barry Commoner Quotes

If we do not permit the earth to produce beauty and joy, it will in the end not produce food, either.

Try to leave the Earth a better place than when you arrived.

Wouldn't it help Americans more, in the long run, if we were forced to accept some responsibility for the environmental wreckage we prefer to assume is totally out of our control?

Unless we keep this planet healthy, everything else is for naught.

One of the most important lessons we can glean from the environmental movement is to 'think globally and act locally.'

A true conservationist is a man who knows that the world is not given by his fathers, but borrowed from his children.

The first rule of sustainability is to align with natural forces, or at least not try to defy them.

If you don't have an ethic of conservation, you basically have a license to drive a Hummer through the Amazon.

If we do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water, how can you buy them?

Environmentalism has failed.

We know it is impossible to go on finding, moving and wasting oil, leveling forests, paving land, dumping poisons, and multiplying our numbers. A new way of life, a new set of thoughts must be found.

This whole idea that we address environmental issues by not doing stuff just doesn't work.

The environmental crisis is all a result of rushing.

But now sustainability is such a political category that it's getting more and more difficult to think about it in a serious way. Sustainability has become an ornament.

We're not environmentally doing very good things to this planet, and we might not be around too long.

Sooner or later, we will have to recognise that the Earth has rights, too, to live without pollution. What mankind must know is that human beings cannot live without Mother Earth, but the planet can live without humans.

The environment has fallen to the wayside in politics.

In the long term the economy and the environment are the same thing. If it is unenvironmental it is uneconomical. That is a rule of nature.

I do believe this period of the 1980's will be remembered as the time the planet struck back. The planet is telling us we can't treat it this way anymore.

Humanity is consuming the resources of the earth and life in an excessive and disordered way, forgetting the earth's own needs

Even the wealth of the U.S. cannot protect against the levels of environmental destruction that we are unleashing.

You can certainly make the case that we're devolving, that it may already be too late to save the rain forests, let alone the planet.

I believe the green movement is gaining momentum because people are becoming more educated about the real importance of living green.

We only have one earth. Let's take care of it.

I feel that our planet is in peril and that creating a sustainable planet for my children and my children's children is the most important thing I can do in this lifetime.