David R. Brower Quotes & Sayings

What's even more unsettling is the way these people hide what they're doing from the public. They strip the labels off miracle wheat when they ship it, for instance, and say, 'Watch out. Don't plant too much and don't depend on it too much.' — David R. Brower

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. — David R. Brower

Until four years ago, in fact, I was absolutely in love with the atom. — David R. Brower

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. — David R. Brower

The goal now is a socialist, redistributionist society, which is nature's proper steward and society's only hope. — David R. Brower

All technology should be assumed guilty until proven innocent — David R. Brower

While the death of young men in war is unfortunate, it is no more serious than the touching of mountains and wilderness areas by humankind. — David R. Brower

People have alleged that I have inspired many young people over the years, but I say, it was just the opposite. — David R. Brower

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. — David R. Brower

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. — David R. Brower

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

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. — David R. Brower

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. — David R. Brower

We've pumped waste into cavities in solid rock and found that it spread through the rock. — David R. Brower

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. — David R. Brower

It seems that every time mankind is given a lot of energy, we go out and wreck something with it. — David R. Brower

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

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

Have fun saving the world, or you are just going to depress yourself. — David R. Brower

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. — David R. Brower

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. — David R. Brower

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

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

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

There is no business on a dead planet — David R. Brower

Without wilderness, the world's a cage. — David R. Brower

If you want to get people off drugs, improve reality. — David R. Brower

Keep your rivers flowing as they will, and you will continue to know the most important of all freedoms-the boundless scope of the human mind to contemplate wonders, and to begin to understand their meaning. — David R. Brower

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. — David R. Brower

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. — David R. Brower

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. — David R. Brower

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. — David R. Brower

Let man heal the hurt places and revere whatever is still miraculously pristine. — David R. Brower

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? — David R. Brower

There is more inside you than you dare think. — David R. Brower

'Realistic' is a loaded word for me. Anyone who uses the word 'realistic' is all bad. — David R. Brower

There is no place where we can safely store worn-out reactors or their garbage. No place! — David R. Brower

Overpopulation is perhaps the biggest problem facing us, and immigration is part of that problem. It has to be addressed. — David R. Brower

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. — David R. Brower

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

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

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. — David R. Brower

You don't have a conservation policy unless you have a population policy. — David R. Brower

We tried burying the waste at sea and the concrete cannisters that held it cracked open. — David R. Brower

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. — David R. Brower

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. — David R. Brower

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? — David R. Brower

Politicians are like weather vanes. Our job is to make the wind blow. — David R. Brower

Let the mountains talk, let the river run. Once more, and forever. — David R. Brower

I believe in the rights of creatures other than man. — David R. Brower

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. — David R. Brower

We are at the edge of an abyss and we're close to being irrevocably lost. — David R. Brower

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

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. — David R. Brower

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

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

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

Once we open the door to the plutonium economy, we expose ourselves to absolutely terrible, horrifying risks from these people. — David R. Brower

The Peninsula is what we have and there is no more where it came from. — David R. Brower

We may learn anew what compassion and beauty are, and pause to listen to the Earth's music. — David R. Brower

What happens when the guy who runs the reactor gets out of bed wrong or decides, for some reason, that he wants to override his instruction sheet some afternoon? — David R. Brower

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. — David R. Brower

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. — David R. Brower

It's like turning the space program over to the Long Island Railroad. — David R. Brower

We cannot go on fiddling while the earth's wild places burn ... — David R. Brower

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. — David R. Brower

We've got to search back to our last known safe landmark. I can't say exactly where, but I think it's back there at the start of the Industrial Revolution, we began applying energy in vast amounts to tools with which we began tearing the environment apart. — David R. Brower

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. — David R. Brower

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. — David R. Brower

I'm always impressed with what young people can do before older people tell them it's impossible — David R. Brower

They simply don't know that much about what they're doing. There isn't enough control. There isn't enough capability in ordinary people to tinker with such a complicated piece of machinery. — David R. Brower