David R. Brower Quotes

• 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.

  David R. Brower

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Gravitational

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Realistic

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in People, Instance

• 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?

  David R. Brower

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Instruction

• We’ve pumped waste into cavities in solid rock and found that it spread through the rock.

  David R. Brower

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Solid

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Environment

• We tried burying the waste at sea and the concrete cannisters that held it cracked open.

  David R. Brower

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Burying

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

  David R. Brower

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Abyss

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

  David R. Brower

  Topics in Love

  Tags in Fact

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

  David R. Brower

  Topics in Love

  Tags in Time

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Capability

• 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

  Topics in Life

  Tags in Calculation

• 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

  Topics in Power

  Tags in Good, Conservation

• 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.

  David R. Brower

  Topics in Future

  Tags in Manufacturers

• 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.

  David R. Brower

  Topics in Work

  Tags in Mechanism

• 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

  Topics in Movies

  Tags in Scientists

• ‘Realistic’ is a loaded word for me. Anyone who uses the word ‘realistic’ is all bad.

  David R. Brower

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Realistic

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

  David R. Brower

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Vote

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Think, Suggestions

• Once we open the door to the plutonium economy, we expose ourselves to absolutely terrible, horrifying risks from these people.

  David R. Brower

  Topics in Economy

  Tags in People

David R. Brower (39)

Birth:	1st July, 1912
Death:	5th November, 2000
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Environmentalist, Mountaineer, Conservationist

About

David Ross Brower was a prominent environmentalist and the founder of many environmental organizations, including the Sierra Club Foundation, 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.

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