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
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.
If you want to get people off drugs, improve reality.
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.
We cannot go on fiddling while the earth's wild places burn....
The goal now is a socialist, redistributionist society, which is nature's proper steward and society's only hope.
There is no business on a dead planet
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.
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.
All technology should be assumed guilty until proven innocent
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.
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.
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?
Realistic' is a loaded word for me. Anyone who uses the word 'realistic' is all bad.