Environmental quality was drastically improved while economic activity grew by the simple expedient of removing lead from gasoline - which prevented it from entering the environment.

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?

If environmentalism is a fad, it will be the last one.

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

World War II had a very important impact on the development of technology, as a whole.

My entry into the environmental arena was through the issue that so dramatically - and destructively - demonstrates the link between science and social action: nuclear weapons.

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.