Quotes from 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.

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.

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.

I believe in the rights of creatures other than man.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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?

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.'

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

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

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

All technology should be assumed guilty until proven innocent