The environment has to blacenced against the economy".This quote portrays environmental concerns as a luxury,views measures to solve environmental problems as incurring net cost, and considers leaving environmental unsolved to be a money saving device.This one liner puts the truth exactly backwards.Environmental messes cost us huge sums of money both in the short run and in the long run;cleaning up or preventing those messes saves us huge sums of money in the long run, and often in the short run as well.In caring for the health of our surrounding's, just as our bodies, it is cheaper and preferable to avoid getting sick than to try to cure the illnesses after they have developed.Just think of the damage caused by agricultural weeds and pests, non agricultural pests like water hyacinths and zebra mussels, the recurrent annual costs of combating those pests, the value lost time when stuck in traffic, the financial cots resulting from people getting sick or dieing from environmental toxins, clean up costs for chemicals, the steep increase in fish prices due to depletion of fish stocks, and the value of farmland being damaged or ruined by erosion and salinization.For instance the value of "one statistically life" in the US.-i.e., the cost to the US resulting from the death of an average American whom society has gone to the expense of rearing and and educating but who dies before a lifetime of contriubteing to the National economy is usually estimated at around 5 million.Even if one take the conservative estimate of annual U.S. deaths due to air pollution as 130,000 then deaths due to air pollution costs us about a billion a year.That illustrates why the U.S. Clean Air Act of 1970, although its clean up measures do cost money, has yielded estimated net health savings of about one trillion a year due to saved lives and reduced health costs.
). 
I have The Skeptical Environmentalist, but it is at home, so I have no way of looking at what he actually wrote right now.
