Science Quote by Barry Commoner

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.