David Brower

David Ross Brower (July 1, 1912 – November 5, 2000) was an American environmentalist, mountain climber, author, and founder of Friends of the Earth (1969), Earth Island Institute (1982), and the John Muir Institute of the Environment (1997), From 1952 to 1969, he served as the inaugural Executive Director of the Sierra Club. In 2009 the David Brower Center was opened.

Quotes

  • While breakfast is cooking, any garbage, including cans, should be burned. Heat removes the protective coating from the cans and hastens their rusting, simplifies smashing them and destroys odors which are tempting to bears et al. The cans may then be (a) placed in a disposal bag if one exists or (b) far preferable, be carried away in your own knapsack or kyack back to the road for later disposal.
  • ... I am very anxious to save the national parks from the National Park Service. I am anxious to save the forests from the Forest Service. It would be nice if we had a Forest Service. Instead, we have a timber service. I have had that bias since 1938. I think that it would be helpful if we could switch the timber operations into the Department of Commerce and reinstate the Forest Service to be concerned with the entire forest. ... The Forest Service has control over a great deal of wilderness, and it is more concerned about (keeping out) human feet than how many bulldozers, chainsaws, and roads are in it. That’s because it is a timber service. ...
    We’ve lost a huge amount of forests in this country and globally. Forests are, in large part, the way the earth breathes. We have to become aware of what the wild forest is doing for us: It is releasing oxygen, storing carbon dioxide, taking care of water and soil and habitat, and giving us beauty. The marketplace doesn’t count any of those things into its thinking. We must admire and credit nature’s services.
    Gretchen Daily, who teaches at Stanford, wrote a book called Nature’s Services: Societal Dependence on Natural Ecosystems, which everyone should read. The gist of the book comes from a separate economics study, which says that something like 34 trillion dollars of nature’s services are used every year. There is no program to pay nature back. Before too long, nature will say your credit is no damn good. That is the part they need to remember about wilderness.

Quotes about David Brouwer

  • In 1912, the year David Brower was born, the world was a vastly different place, and nature still held dominion in most parts of California, including his hometown of Berkeley. Back then, the town's population was just over forty thousand. Today, it's more than 110,000. ... During that same time, the U.S. population grew from 92 million to something over 300 million. California's population rose fastest: from 2.3 million to 37 million. Brower often bemoaned this rapid population rise and argued that it must be slowed and eventually reversed in order to avoid running out of air, water, and the other necessities of life—and to leave some space for the other beings that share the planet with us. "How dense can people be?" was one his many quips, this one later turned into a lapel button.
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