"What is needed now is a transformation of the major systems of production more profound than even the sweeping post-World War II changes in production technology"
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Commoner isn’t asking for greener gadgets; he’s calling out the scale of the problem with a historian’s yardstick. By measuring today’s need against the post-World War II production revolution, he invokes the most dramatic economic retooling modern America can remember: wartime industry converted into consumer abundance, petrochemicals and plastics flooding the market, mechanized agriculture, suburban logistics, and a culture that treated throughput as virtue. That era didn’t merely upgrade tools. It rewired daily life, corporate power, labor relations, and the planet’s chemistry. Commoner’s wager is that incremental environmental fixes cannot compete with systems engineered to maximize extraction and waste.
The specific intent is strategic: to move the debate from personal morality and end-of-pipe cleanup to the architecture of production itself. Commoner, a scientist who became one of the sharpest public critics of industrial pollution, is insisting that ecological crisis is not an accidental side effect but a predictable output of how we make things. The subtext is accusatory without naming names: the “major systems” he targets are fossil-fueled energy, chemical-intensive farming, disposable consumer goods, and profit-driven industrial design. He’s also puncturing the comforting myth that technology alone will save us, because the postwar example shows technology can just as easily scale harm.
Context matters: Commoner wrote amid rising environmental consciousness and political attempts to regulate pollution. He’s warning that regulation is necessary but insufficient if the underlying machinery of production remains committed to growth-at-all-costs. The line lands because it reframes “change” as something society has already proven capable of - and implies we’ll need that same mobilized ambition, this time aimed at survival rather than abundance.
The specific intent is strategic: to move the debate from personal morality and end-of-pipe cleanup to the architecture of production itself. Commoner, a scientist who became one of the sharpest public critics of industrial pollution, is insisting that ecological crisis is not an accidental side effect but a predictable output of how we make things. The subtext is accusatory without naming names: the “major systems” he targets are fossil-fueled energy, chemical-intensive farming, disposable consumer goods, and profit-driven industrial design. He’s also puncturing the comforting myth that technology alone will save us, because the postwar example shows technology can just as easily scale harm.
Context matters: Commoner wrote amid rising environmental consciousness and political attempts to regulate pollution. He’s warning that regulation is necessary but insufficient if the underlying machinery of production remains committed to growth-at-all-costs. The line lands because it reframes “change” as something society has already proven capable of - and implies we’ll need that same mobilized ambition, this time aimed at survival rather than abundance.
Quote Details
| Topic | Reinvention |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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