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

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

In general, any productive activity which introduces substances foreign to the natural environment runs a considerable risk of polluting it.

We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation.

Environmental concern is now firmly embedded in public life: in education, medicine and law; in journalism, literature and art.

The environmental crisis is somber evidence of an insidious fraud hidden in the vaunted productivity and wealth of modern, technology-based society. This wealth has been gained by rapid short-term exploitation of the environmental system, but it has blindly accumulated a debt to nature-a debt so large and so pervasive that in the next generation it may, if unpaid, wipe out most of the wealth it has gained us.