David R. Brower Quotes

All technology should be assumed guilty until proven innocent

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.

I will say this, - though: If it is true that fusion will put unlimited amounts of energy into our hands, then I'm worried. Our record on this score is extremely poor.

Politics is democracy's way of handling public business. We won't get the type of country in the kind of world we want unless people take part in the public's business.

Without wilderness, the world's a cage.

True wilderness is where you keep it, and real wilderness experience cannot be a sedentary one; you have to seek it out not seated, but afoot.

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.

I sort of kept my hand in writing and went to work for the Sierra Club in '52, walked the plank there in '69, founded Friends of the Earth and the League of Conservation Voters after that.

Some otherwise sane scientists have seriously proposed that we tuck this deadly garbage under the edges of drifting continents but how can they be sure the moving land masses will climb over the waste and not just push it forward?

We still need conservationists who will attempt the impossible, achieving it because they aren't aware how impossible it is.

There is no business on a dead planet

The Sierra Club is a very good and a very powerful force for conservation and, as a matter of fact, has grown faster since I left than it was growing while I was there! It must be doing something right.

Even if you build the perfect reactor, you're still saddled with a people problem and an equipment problem.

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.

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.

Understanding how DNA transmits all it knows about cancer, physics, dreaming and love will keep man searching for some time.

The Peninsula is what we have and there is no more where it came from.

At that time a senator who was on the Joint Committee of Atomic Energy said rather quietly, 'You know, we're having a little problem with waste these days.' I didn't know what he meant then, but I know now.

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.

Bring diversity back to agriculture. That's what made it work in the first place.

A great deal of pressure was then built up to remove me from the club and my resignation was, finally, a forced one.

If something's going wrong with this planet we'd better fix it here and not look for some sort of escape.

All I know about thermal pollution is that if we continue our present rate of growth in electrical energy consumption it will simply take, by the year 2000, all our freshwater streams to cool the generators and reactors.

Truth and beauty can still win battles. We need more art, more passion, more wit in defense of the Earth.

We are no longer inheriting the Earth from our parents, we are stealing it from our children.

You don't have a conservation policy unless you have a population policy.

Sometimes luck is with you, and sometimes not, but the important thing is to take the dare. Those who climb mountains or raft rivers understand this.

Perhaps we'll realize that each of us has not one vote but ten thousand or a million.

Let man heal the hurt places and revere whatever is still miraculously pristine.

It's very hard for me to know what to say about fusion right now, inasmuch as it is not yet scientifically feasible. I just can't understand how so many people are able to predict so much about something that still isn't scientifically possible.

Is the minor convenience of allowing the present generation the luxury of doubling its energy consumption every 10 years worth the major hazard of exposing the next 20,000 generations to this lethal waste?

Have fun saving the world, or you are just going to depress yourself.

There is more inside you than you dare think.

I was actually telling people that - by harnessing the atom - we could enter a new era of unlimited power that would do away with the need to dam our beautiful streams.

We cannot go on fiddling while the earth's wild places burn ...

Until four years ago, in fact, I was absolutely in love with the atom.

I believe that the average guy in the street will give up a great deal, if he really understands the cost of not giving it up. In fact, we may find that, while we're drastically cutting our energy consumption, we're actually raising our standard of living.

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.

When people say, 'You're not being realistic,' they're just trying to tag some thoughts that they can't otherwise handle.

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.

Politicians are like weather vanes. Our job is to make the wind blow.

To me, a wilderness is where the flow of wildness is essentially uninterrupted by technology; without wilderness the world is a cage.

There are many ways to salvation, and one of them is to follow a river.

It's like turning the space program over to the Long Island Railroad.

I don't think we have very good records about what they were thinking except, as I pointed out earlier today, that they did invent our political system.