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.
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.
Even if you build the perfect reactor, you’re still saddled with a people problem and an equipment problem.
We cannot go on fiddling while the earth’s wild places burn...
People have alleged that I have inspired many young people over the years, but I say, it was just the opposite.
Politicians are like weather vanes. Our job is to make the wind blow.
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.
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.
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?
Understanding how DNA transmits all it knows about cancer, physics, dreaming and love will keep man searching for some time.
There is no business on a dead planet.
The goal now is a socialist, redistributionist society, which is nature’s proper steward and society’s only hope.
I believe in the rights of creatures other than man.
Politics is democracy’s way of handling public business. We won’t get the type of country in the kind of world we want unless people take part in the public’s business.
If you want to get people off drugs, improve reality.
Once we open the door to the plutonium economy, we expose ourselves to absolutely terrible, horrifying risks from these people.
We are no longer inheriting the Earth from our parents, we are stealing it from our children.
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.
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.
Until four years ago, in fact, I was absolutely in love with the atom.
True wilderness is where you keep it, and real wilderness experience cannot be a sedentary one; you have to seek it out not seated, but afoot.