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.
- David R. Brower Quote

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.
- David R. Brower Quote

Bring diversity back to agriculture. That's what made it work in the first place.
- David R. Brower Quote

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.
- David R. Brower Quote

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.
- David R. Brower Quote

I sort of kept my hand in writing and went to work for the Sierra Club in '52, walked the plank there in '69, founded Friends of the Earth and the League of Conservation Voters after that.
- David R. Brower Quote

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.
- David R. Brower Quote

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.
- David R. Brower Quote

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

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.
- David R. Brower Quote

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.
- David R. Brower Quote

'Realistic' is a loaded word for me. Anyone who uses the word 'realistic' is all bad.
- David R. Brower Quote

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?
- David R. Brower Quote

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.
- David R. Brower Quote

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.
- David R. Brower Quote

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

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.
- David R. Brower Quote

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

We are at the edge of an abyss and we're close to being irrevocably lost.
- David R. Brower Quote

We've got to search back to our last known safe landmark. I can't say exactly where, but I think it's back there at the start of the Industrial Revolution, we began applying energy in vast amounts to tools with which we began tearing the environment apart.
- David R. Brower Quote

We've pumped waste into cavities in solid rock and found that it spread through the rock.
- David R. Brower Quote

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.'
- David R. Brower Quote

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