Words matter. These are the best David R. Brower Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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.
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.
It seems that every time mankind is given a lot of energy, we go out and wreck something with it.
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.
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’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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It’s like turning the space program over to the Long Island Railroad.
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.
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.
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 are at the edge of an abyss and we’re close to being irrevocably lost.
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.
There is no place where we can safely store worn-out reactors or their garbage. No place!
Even if you build the perfect reactor, you’re still saddled with a people problem and an equipment problem.
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.
Understanding how DNA transmits all it knows about cancer, physics, dreaming and love will keep man searching for some time.
Once we open the door to the plutonium economy, we expose ourselves to absolutely terrible, horrifying risks from these people.
Perhaps we’ll realize that each of us has not one vote but ten thousand or a million.
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.
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.
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?
