David R. Brower
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.Collection: Cool
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.Collection: Work
There is no place where we can safely store worn-out reactors or their garbage. No place!Collection: Environmental
It seems that every time mankind is given a lot of energy, we go out and wreck something with it.Collection: Environmental
We are at the edge of an abyss and we're close to being irrevocably lost.
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'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.
Bring diversity back to agriculture. That's what made it work in the first place.
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.
Even if you build the perfect reactor, you're still saddled with a people problem and an equipment problem.
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.
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.
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.
A great deal of pressure was then built up to remove me from the club and my resignation was, finally, a forced one.
Until four years ago, in fact, I was absolutely in love with the atom.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
What happens when the guy who runs the reactor gets out of bed wrong or decides, for some reason, that he wants to override his instruction sheet some afternoon?
Once we open the door to the plutonium economy, we expose ourselves to absolutely terrible, horrifying risks from these people.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's like turning the space program over to the Long Island Railroad.
'Realistic' is a loaded word for me. Anyone who uses the word 'realistic' is all bad.
When people say, 'You're not being realistic,' they're just trying to tag some thoughts that they can't otherwise handle.
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.'
Perhaps we'll realize that each of us has not one vote but ten thousand or a million.
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.
We must begin thinking like a river if we are to leave a legacy of beauty and life for future generations.Collection: Nature
We are no longer inheriting the Earth from our parents, we are stealing it from our children.Collection: Children
I'm always impressed with what young people can do before older people tell them it's impossibleCollection: People
The wild places are where we began. When they end, so do we.Collection: Nature
There is no business on a dead planetCollection: Business
Truth and beauty can still win battles. We need more art, more passion, more wit in defense of the Earth.Collection: Art
Without wilderness, the world's a cage.Collection: World
Childbearing should be a punishable crime against society, unless the parents hold a government license. All potential parents should be required to use contraceptive chemicals, the government issuing antidotes to citizens chosen for childbearing.Collection: Government
All technology should be assumed guilty until proven innocentCollection: Technology
Let the mountains talk, let the river run. Once more, and forever.Collection: Running
We still need conservationists who will attempt the impossible, achieving it because they aren't aware how impossible it is.Collection: Needs