"Nothing ever goes away"
About this Quote
Nothing ever goes away distills Barry Commoners core ecological insight: the planet is a closed system where materials and consequences circulate rather than vanish. Commoner formulated his second law of ecology as "Everything must go somewhere", and the point is both physical and moral. Matter is conserved; the landfill, sewer, and smokestack only reroute what we refuse to face. Toxic residues do not disappear; they settle into soils, rivers, bodies, and food chains.
Commoner wrote The Closing Circle in 1971 to explain how modern production systems created a new kind of persistent waste. Synthetic chemicals like DDT and PCBs linger for decades and biomagnify in fish and wildlife. Today, the lesson is even clearer with PFAS "forever chemicals", microplastics, and the long atmospheric lifetime of carbon dioxide. The illusion of away is really displacement: from affluent neighborhoods to sacrifice zones, from rich countries to informal dumps abroad, from present comforts to future burdens. Environmental justice enters here, because the people living closest to the new "somewhere" pay the price for others apparent convenience.
The line also exposes the fallacy of externalities in economics. Costs that firms and consumers push off the balance sheet still exist; they reappear as asthma rates, tainted groundwater, degraded fisheries, and climate risk. The practical response is not magical cleanup but different design. Reduce at the source, eliminate hazardous inputs, and build circular flows where materials are reused rather than discarded. Extended producer responsibility, cradle-to-cradle design, and true-cost accounting turn the insight into policy and practice.
Nothing ever goes away asks for humility about technological power and patience about time scales. Carbon emitted today will warm the air for centuries; nuclear waste will outlast civilizations. Memory, not amnesia, is the ecological virtue. Act as if the residues of our lives remain with us, because they do.
Commoner wrote The Closing Circle in 1971 to explain how modern production systems created a new kind of persistent waste. Synthetic chemicals like DDT and PCBs linger for decades and biomagnify in fish and wildlife. Today, the lesson is even clearer with PFAS "forever chemicals", microplastics, and the long atmospheric lifetime of carbon dioxide. The illusion of away is really displacement: from affluent neighborhoods to sacrifice zones, from rich countries to informal dumps abroad, from present comforts to future burdens. Environmental justice enters here, because the people living closest to the new "somewhere" pay the price for others apparent convenience.
The line also exposes the fallacy of externalities in economics. Costs that firms and consumers push off the balance sheet still exist; they reappear as asthma rates, tainted groundwater, degraded fisheries, and climate risk. The practical response is not magical cleanup but different design. Reduce at the source, eliminate hazardous inputs, and build circular flows where materials are reused rather than discarded. Extended producer responsibility, cradle-to-cradle design, and true-cost accounting turn the insight into policy and practice.
Nothing ever goes away asks for humility about technological power and patience about time scales. Carbon emitted today will warm the air for centuries; nuclear waste will outlast civilizations. Memory, not amnesia, is the ecological virtue. Act as if the residues of our lives remain with us, because they do.
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