To me, a wilderness is where the flow of wildness is essentially uninterrupted by technology; without wilderness the world is a cage.
We need the sea. We need a place to stand and touch and listen - to feel the pusle of the world as the surf rolls in.
There is more inside you than you dare think.
It seems that every time mankind is given a lot of energy, we go out and wreck something with it.
We cannot go on fiddling while the earth's wild places burn.
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?
Overpopulation is perhaps the biggest problem facing us, and immigration is part of that problem. It has to be addressed.
Realistic' is a loaded word for me. Anyone who uses the word 'realistic' is all bad.
What we are finding out now is that there are not only limits to growth but also to technology and that we cannot allow technology to go on without public consent.
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.
There is no place where we can safely store worn-out reactors or their garbage. No place!
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.
Let man heal the hurt places and revere whatever is still miraculously pristine.
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.
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.
A great deal of pressure was then built up to remove me from the club and my resignation was, finally, a forced one.
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.
You don't need it, but will you take some advice from a Californian who's been around for a while? Cherish these rivers. Witness for them. Enjoy their unimprovable purpose as you sense it, and let those rivers that you never visit comfort you with the assurance that they are there, doing wonderfully what they have always done.
I believe that the average guy in the street will give up a great deal, if he really understands the cost of not giving it up. In fact, we may find that, while we're drastically cutting our energy consumption, we're actually raising our standard of living.
You don't have a conservation policy unless you have a population policy.
The goal now is a socialist, redistributionist society, which is nature's proper steward and society's only hope.
If something's going wrong with this planet we'd better fix it here and not look for some sort of escape.
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.
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.
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?
