David R. Brower
David R. Brower
David Ross Browerwas a prominent environmentalist and the founder of many environmental organizations, including the John Muir Institute for Environmental Studies, Friends of the Earth, the League of Conservation Voters, Earth Island Institute, North Cascades Conservation Council, and Fate of the Earth Conferences. From 1952 to 1969, he served as the first Executive Director of the Sierra Club, and served on its board three times: from 1941–1953; 1983–1988; and 1995–2000. As a younger man, he was a prominent mountaineer...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEnvironmentalist
Date of Birth1 July 1912
CountryUnited States of America
Even if you build the perfect reactor, you're still saddled with a people problem and an equipment problem.
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.
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.
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.
It's like turning the space program over to the Long Island Railroad.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Politicians are like weather vanes. Our job is to make the wind blow.
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.
Polite conversationalists leave no mark save the scars upon the Earth that could have been prevented had they stood their ground.
We are no longer inheriting the Earth from our parents, we are stealing it from our children.