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Barry Commoner
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Science Quotes by Barry Commoner (9 quotes)
1. The First Law of Ecology: Everything is connected to everything else.
— Barry Commoner
In The Closing Circle: Nature, Man, and Technology (2014).
2. The Second Law of Ecology: Everything must go somewhere.
— Barry Commoner
In The Closing Circle: Nature, Man, and Technology (2014).
3. The Third Law of Ecology: Nature knows best.
— Barry Commoner
In The Closing Circle: Nature, Man, and Technology (2014).
4. The Fourth Law of Ecology: There is no such thing as a free lunch.
— Barry Commoner
In The Closing Circle: Nature, Man, and Technology (2014).
Clearly, we have compiled a record of serious failures in recent technological encounters with the environment. In each case, the new technology was brought into use before the ultimate hazards were known. We have been quick to reap the benefits and slow to comprehend the costs.
— Barry Commoner
In 'Frail Reeds in a Harsh World', Natural History Journal of the American Museum of Natural History (Feb 1969), 79, No. 2, 44.
Despite the dazzling successes of modern technology and the unprecedented power of modern military systems, they suffer from a common and catastrophic fault. While providing us with a bountiful supply of food, with great industrial plants, with high-speed transportation, and with military weapons of unprecedented power, they threaten our very survival.
— Barry Commoner
In Science and Survival (1966).
Ecology has not yet explicitly developed the kind of cohesive, simplifying generalizations exemplified by, say, the laws of physics. Nevertheless there are a number of generalizations that are already evident in what we now know about the ecosphere and that can be organized into a kind of informal set of laws of ecology.
— Barry Commoner
In The Closing Circle: Nature, Man, and Technology (2014).
Science is triumphant with far-ranging success, but its triumph is somehow clouded by growing difficulties in providing for the simple necessities of human life on earth.
— Barry Commoner
In Science and Survival (1966).
The varieties of chemical substances actually found in living things are vastly more restricted than the possible varieties. A striking illustration is that if one molecule each of all the possible types of proteins were made, they would together weigh more than the observable universe. Obviously there are a fantastically large number of protein types that are not made by living cells.
— Barry Commoner
In The Closing Circle: Nature, Man, and Technology (2014).
Quotes by others about Barry Commoner (1)
In recent years it has become impossible to talk about man’s relation to nature without referring to “ecology” … such leading scientists in this area as Rachel Carson, Barry Commoner, Eugene Odum, Paul Ehrlich and others, have become our new delphic voices … so influential has their branch of science become that our time might well be called the “Age of Ecology”.
In opening paragraph of Preface, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (1994), 14.
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
