David R. Brower Quotes

God gave us the earth. We have dominion over the plants, the animals, the seas…. God said “Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it. It’s yours.”

If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.

We're adding a billion people every decade. We're just spin doctors. Whatever we do is supposedly great, and yet it's always at the expense of diversity and nature. We're like elephants. The ecology of the elephant is more similar to human than any other.

All our environmental problems become easier to solve with fewer people and harder - and ultimately impossible to solve - with ever more people.

Nothing was made by God for man to spoil or destroy.

We have an economy that tells us it is cheaper to destroy earth in real time rather than renew, restore, and sustain it. You can print money to bail out a bank but you can't print life to bail out a planet.

I believe in a sound, strong environmental policy that protects the health of our people and a wise stewardship of our nation's natural resources.

We have, in a sense, lorded it over nature, over Sister Earth, over Mother Earth, i think man has gone too far.

We have not wondered enough at the delights God has given us to appreciate them, and be good stewards. We have overworked the land, poured pollutants into river and stream, fouled the air we breathe with gas fumes and chemical smoke spiraling up from industrial chimneys. We have sown the wind. We are reaping the whirlwind.

If we go on using the Earth uncaringly and without replenishing it, then we are just greedy consumers.

Today the great gift of God's Creation is exposed to serious dangers and lifestyles which can degrade it. Environmental pollution is making particularly unsustainable the lives of the poor of the world ... we must pledge ourselves to take care of creation and to share its resources in solidarity.

We have an obligation to live in harmony with creation, with our capital... with God's creation. And we need to administer and work that very carefully.

Humans merely share the earth. We can only protect the land, not own it.

Wouldn't it help Americans more, in the long run, if we were forced to accept some responsibility for the environmental wreckage we prefer to assume is totally out of our control?

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.

If we pollute the air, water and soil that keep us alive and well, and destroy the biodiversity that allows natural systems to function, no amount of money will save us.

The Earth does not belong to us: we belong to the Earth.

In a fragile environment, we need to be aware of ourselves as members of a uniquely powerful species living among other species who are quite as interesting as we are but vulnerable to us because we are cleverer in more destructive ways.

Because we're not in harmony with the environment, we're destroying the environment that supports us.

Nature provides a free lunch, but only if we control our appetites.

If the world is presented as resources to be exploited, then, more than likely, you're going to exploit the world.

If you sort of treat the environment in sort of this mechanical, industrial way that there's a disconnect between man and the environment, it's very easy to treat people that way.

It hurts the spirit, somehow, to read the word environments, when the plural means that there are so many alternatives there to be sorted through, as in a market, and voted on.

If we do not permit the earth to produce beauty and joy, it will in the end not produce food, either.

I haven't inherited the earth from my parents, I am borrowing it from my children.