Quotes from David R. Brower

When people say, 'You're not being realistic,' they're just trying to tag some thoughts that they can't otherwise handle.

Perhaps we'll realize that each of us has not one vote but ten thousand or a million.

To me, a wilderness is where the flow of wildness is essentially uninterrupted by technology; without wilderness the world is a cage.

What we are finding out now is that there are not only limits to growth but also to technology and that we cannot allow technology to go on without public consent.

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

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.

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.

I will say this, - though: If it is true that fusion will put unlimited amounts of energy into our hands, then I'm worried. Our record on this score is extremely poor.

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.

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

A great deal of pressure was then built up to remove me from the club and my resignation was, finally, a forced one.

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.

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.

Truth and beauty can still win battles. We need more art, more passion, more wit in defense of the Earth.

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

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.

Politics is democracy's way of handling public business. We won't get the type of country in the kind of world we want unless people take part in the public's business.

It's like turning the space program over to the Long Island Railroad.

Sometimes luck is with you, and sometimes not, but the important thing is to take the dare. Those who climb mountains or raft rivers understand this.

Understanding how DNA transmits all it knows about cancer, physics, dreaming and love will keep man searching for some time.

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 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.

Let man heal the hurt places and revere whatever is still miraculously pristine.

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.