David R. Brower

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“There is no place where we can safely store worn-out reactors or their garbage. No place!”

“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.”

“It seems that every time mankind is given a lot of energy, we go out and wreck something with it.”

“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.”

“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 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.”

“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.”

“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?”

“Even if you build the perfect reactor, you're still saddled with a people problem and an equipment problem.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“We've pumped waste into cavities in solid rock and found that it spread through the rock.”

“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.”

“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?”