David R. Brower Quotes
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It seems that every time mankind is given a lot of energy, we go out and wreck something with it.
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Understanding how DNA transmits all it knows about cancer, physics, dreaming and love will keep man searching for some time.
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You don't have a conservation policy unless you have a population policy.
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Let man heal the hurt places and revere whatever is still miraculously pristine.
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Perhaps most ridiculous of all is the suggestion that we 'keep' our radioactive garbage for the use of our descendants. This 'solution', I think, requires an immediate poll of the next 20,000 generations.
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For how many people do you think might yet stand on this planet before the sun grows cold? That's the responsibility we hold in our hands.
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The risk presented by these lethal wastes is like no other risk, and we should not be expected to accept it or to project it into the future in order for manufacturers and utilities to make a dollar killing now.
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Polite conservationists leave no mark save the scars upon the Earth that could have been prevented had they stood their ground.
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Politicians are like weather vanes. Our job is to make the wind blow.
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We must begin thinking like a river if we are to leave a legacy of beauty and life for future generations.
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What we are finding out now is that there are not only limits to growth but also to technology and that we cannot allow technology to go on without public consent.
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Yet another proposal would have us rocket the waste into the sun, but, as you're probably aware, about one in ten of our space shots doesn't quite make it out of the earth's gravitational field.
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Have fun saving the world, or you are just going to depress yourself.
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There is no place where we can safely store worn-out reactors or their garbage. No place!
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It's like turning the space program over to the Long Island Railroad.
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People have alleged that I have inspired many young people over the years, but I say, it was just the opposite.
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You don't need it, but will you take some advice from a Californian who's been around for a while? Cherish these rivers. Witness for them. Enjoy their unimprovable purpose as you sense it, and let those rivers that you never visit comfort you with the assurance that they are there, doing wonderfully what they have always done.
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The more we pour the big machines, the fuel, the pesticides, the herbicides, the fertilizer and chemicals into farming, the more we knock out the mechanism that made it all work in the first place.
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Apollo 13, as you may remember, gave us a reactor that is bubbling away right now somewhere in the Pacific. It's supposed to be bubbling away on the moon, but it's in the Pacific Ocean instead.
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If I could go back to a point in history to try to get things to come out differently, I would go back and tell moses to go up the mountain again and get the other tablet. Because the Ten Commandments just tell us what we are supped to do with one another, not a word about our relationship to the earth. Genesis starts with these commands: multiply, replenish the earth, and subdue it. We have multiplied very well, we have replenished our populations very well, we have subdued it all too well, and we don't have any other instruction.
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I began working with the John Muir Institute and then started helping found Friends of the Earth organizations here and there in other countries. That pretty well brings us up to the present.
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The goal now is a socialist, redistributionist society, which is nature's proper steward and society's only hope.
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There are many different kinds of radioactive waste and each has its own half-life so, just to be on the safe side and to simplify matters, I base my calculations on the worst one and that's plutonium.
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Let the mountains talk, let the river run. Once more, and forever.
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Childbearing should be a punishable crime against society, unless the parents hold a government license. All potential parents should be required to use contraceptive chemicals, the government issuing antidotes to citizens chosen for childbearing.
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All technology should be assumed guilty until proven innocent
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There are many ways to salvation, and one of them is to follow a river.
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It is absolutely imperative that we protect, preserve and pass on this genetic heritage for man and every other living thing in as good a condition as we received it.
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There is more inside you than you dare think.
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To me, a wilderness is where the flow of wildness is essentially uninterrupted by technology; without wilderness the world is a cage.
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