Quotes By 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
Once we open the door to the plutonium economy, we expose ourselves to absolutely terrible, horrifying risks from these people.
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
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
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
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
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
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
'Realistic' is a loaded word for me. Anyone who uses the word 'realistic' is all bad.
David R. Brower
We've pumped waste into cavities in solid rock and found that it spread through the rock.
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
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
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
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
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
Understanding how DNA transmits all it knows about cancer, physics, dreaming and love will keep man searching for some time.
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
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
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
We tried burying the waste at sea and the concrete cannisters that held it cracked open.
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 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
It seems that every time mankind is given a lot of energy, we go out and wreck something with it.
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