"The most meaningful engine of change, powerful enough to confront corporate power, may be not so much environmental quality, as the economic development and growth associated with the effort to improve it"
About this Quote
Commoner isn’t flattering capitalism here; he’s trying to outmaneuver it. The line reads like a strategic concession: if corporate power is the obstacle, then moral appeals about “environmental quality” won’t be the lever. Money will. He’s reframing ecological reform as an industrial project - jobs, investment, new infrastructure - because that’s the language political systems and boardrooms are structurally built to hear.
The subtext is a diagnosis of power, not a celebration of growth. “May be not so much” signals impatience with purity politics: the idea that clean air and water win simply by being right. Commoner suggests that environmentalism becomes historically effective when it stops sounding like sacrifice and starts sounding like a growth agenda that can build its own coalition. Economic development isn’t the end; it’s the forcing mechanism, the way you create constituencies strong enough to stare down entrenched extractive industries.
Context matters: Commoner came up in the mid-century era of Big Science and Big Industry, then became a key public intellectual in modern environmentalism (radiation fallout, pollution, the limits of technological optimism). By the time this argument crystallizes, “corporate power” isn’t abstract; it’s the real capacity of firms to set policy terms, capture regulators, and market inevitability as common sense.
There’s also an edge here that feels newly current: green politics succeeds when it is a material plan, not just an ethic. Commoner anticipates the logic behind today’s clean-energy industrial policy - not because markets are virtuous, but because movements win when they can promise livelihoods along with limits.
The subtext is a diagnosis of power, not a celebration of growth. “May be not so much” signals impatience with purity politics: the idea that clean air and water win simply by being right. Commoner suggests that environmentalism becomes historically effective when it stops sounding like sacrifice and starts sounding like a growth agenda that can build its own coalition. Economic development isn’t the end; it’s the forcing mechanism, the way you create constituencies strong enough to stare down entrenched extractive industries.
Context matters: Commoner came up in the mid-century era of Big Science and Big Industry, then became a key public intellectual in modern environmentalism (radiation fallout, pollution, the limits of technological optimism). By the time this argument crystallizes, “corporate power” isn’t abstract; it’s the real capacity of firms to set policy terms, capture regulators, and market inevitability as common sense.
There’s also an edge here that feels newly current: green politics succeeds when it is a material plan, not just an ethic. Commoner anticipates the logic behind today’s clean-energy industrial policy - not because markets are virtuous, but because movements win when they can promise livelihoods along with limits.
Quote Details
| Topic | Justice |
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