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

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

In nature, no organic substance is synthesized unless there is provision for its degradation; recycling is enforced.

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

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

Our assaults on the ecosystem are so powerful, so numerous, so finely interconnected, that although the damage they do is clear, it is very difficult to discover how it was done. By which weapon? In whose hand? Are we driving the ecosphere to destruction simply by our growing numbers? By our greedy accumulation of wealth? Or are the machines which we have built to gain this wealth-the magnificent technology that now feeds us out of neat packages, that clothes us in man-made fibers, that surrounds us with new chemical creations-at fault?

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