Science Quote by Barry Commoner

Commoner is doing something sly here: he frames environmental justice not as a moral side-quest to “real” economic growth, but as a design problem for the next economy. “The wave of new productive enterprises” evokes industrial dynamism - factories, jobs, innovation - then immediately reroutes that energy toward redistribution, not of wealth directly, but of risk. The move is strategic: if pollution and toxic exposure have been allocated like a hidden tax on the poor and on communities of color, then the act of building new industries becomes a chance to rewrite the terms of that tax.

The intent is practical and political at once. Commoner, a scientist deeply engaged in public debate, is speaking against the fatalism that treats environmental harm as the price of progress. By emphasizing “opportunities,” he’s signaling that injustice is not an accident of geography but a consequence of decisions: zoning, siting, labor markets, regulatory capture. If those decisions created a lopsided map of hazards, different decisions can unmake it.

The subtext is also a rebuke to mainstream environmentalism of his era, which often centered pristine wilderness and consumer guilt while leaving the urban, industrial front lines under-discussed. Commoner’s phrasing insists that environmental hazards are already distributed; the question is whether the next round of investment will keep laundering inequality through “development,” or whether development can be engineered to stop sacrificing certain bodies and neighborhoods for everyone else’s convenience.