Quotes from Douglas Tompkins

When they're growing up, if you tell kids God exists, they believe it. It's the same with the techno-cultural society. They believe in it - that it's the road to paradise, that there are no limits.

These parks are our life's work, not the clothing chains we created, selling people clothes they don't need.

It is really your behaviour that determines whether you're a patriot.

Every single national park had some component of private philanthropy.

Capitalism may have all sorts of things that are good, but ultimately, it's bad for everyone.

I'm short on celebrations and long on getting to work.

I feel a strong bond with Chile and Argentina.

I have even begun to think that I am caring for Argentina and Chile perhaps more than Argentines and Chileans. I feel like I'm sort of a de facto citizen, because I am looking after their national patrimony - which is the land - very carefully.

When we began working on Parque Pumalin, rumours flew that we were establishing a nuclear waste site for the United States or, oddly for Episcopalians, which we both are, setting up a Jewish state. It would be funny if these theories weren't being taken very seriously.

Capitalism doesn't function when it starts to contract, and we can see that quite clearly right here in the eurozone. It's like pushing a giant monster under water that's gasping for air. It goes nuts.

If you're trashing your own country, ruining the soils, contaminating the waters and the air, cutting down trees, overfishing the lakes, rivers and oceans, you're not much of a patriot.

I just feel lucky that I somehow escaped from the confines of the business class... I feel so fortunate that somehow I managed to break out of that world and get to do something that really had more meaning.

I don't think capitalism can survive.

Resource efficiency is the wrong metric. We should use nature as the measure, using nature's wisdom as a template for our economic systems.

Look at how fast technology is developing.

There's big granite walls up toward the Argentine border, but the weather's serious, and a lot of the rock is mossy and wet.

There's no doubt whatsoever that there's no future in capitalism. It's probably no more than 500 years old, and it's demonstrating over and over again that it is destroying the world.

As we get sucked more and more into the technosphere, we become less and less capable of understanding it because it becomes a technological milieu that we're in.

We choose the national park idea because it's really the highest form of protection for landscapes that exists under current law, especially in Chile and Argentina.

Despite my great disappointment in American foreign policy, I am very proud of the American tradition of wild land conservation. It is the best tradition and example of land conservation in the world. It goes back a long way.

I just realized at least what I was doing was making a lot of stuff that nobody needed and pushing a consumerist society. So I went to do something else.

If you're not willing to take the political heat, then you shouldn't get into the game of land conservation, especially on a large scale.

The computer is a mechanism for acceleration: it accelerates economic activity, and this is eating up the world. It's eating up resources, it's processing, it's manufacturing, it's distributing, it's consuming. That's what the computer's real work does, and it does that 24/7, 365 days a year, non-stop, just to satisfy our own narrow needs.

If you take guys like Exequiel Bustillo, the architect who designed the early park infrastructure in Argentina, or the great American architects, these guys had a vision that thrust the national park idea into the public eye.