David R. Brower Quotes

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David R. Brower

Profession : Environmentalist

Birth : July 1, 1912

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David R. Brower

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

David R. Brower

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

David R. Brower

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

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

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