David Brower Discusses the Environmental Crisis (1970)

we've got an international interest. We need it and it needs to be started here in the United States, an international interest in the restoration of the planet of the environment because it is here that all the worst polluters are. We are primarily responsible for most of us going wrong, I think, in the globe. And it only serves us right to sit down and see what you can do about fixing it. The title came up in what Ed Matthews is saying about the European attitude toward the environment and how it is changing, not quite so rapidly as our own. But he gave a sentence which I recast this way as a good title and perhaps you'd like to make a pin of it. What will it cost the earth? I like that and I don't know quite what we'll do with it, but if I don't do something with it, please do it yourself. What will it cost the earth? It seems to me that we might sort of introduce the subject that I'm supposed to be talking about tonight, whatever it's going to be. And see if I can answer that question however indirectly. I think that I won't really answer it. I think that all we should do is make sure that I start my speech with its conclusion.

We must make sure that every time we do something, we have asked that question first. What will it cost the earth? I like to go through a little litany I've worked out two of them before I get down to my random notes. First, I think as I did way back in 1959, but there is one principle question before the United States and before the world. And that question, which I wrote it then, and it's getting old hat now, it's on pins, how dense can people be? And I think the answer is about, as a starter, people should be only half as dense as they now are, and I think it can be even less dense so much the better. If they were just half as dense as they are now, that would put the population of the earth down to say about one and three quarters billion, population of the United States down to a hundred million. And if that seems just too far out for you to contemplate, rest assured that it doesn't seem

that way to me because that was the population of the earth and the United States roughly when I graduated from high school. It may seem to you that that was a long, long time to go, but it's hardly any time to go in my own recollection. So I can remember Berkeley in the late 20s, it was a little bit more peaceful and it was the last two or three days that I called home tonight and Berkeley's peaceful this weekend. But back at that population and incidentally, in the late 20s, California had only one quarter the population has today, only five million. They still had the critical mass of people it made, made culture possible. We called it a culture. We had some theater in San Francisco, more theater than we have now. We had symphony. We had mass transportation. We had some pretty good things going on to look at. We had some open space. We had some water that was better to drink. We had more bay than we have now. And we certainly had much better air. So I think it's a fairly good goal to start toward.

Let's decline the population somehow. And I would add right off the bat that the first place to start controlling population, divided thinking, is in middle class and affluent white America. I think the reason is fairly obvious, but the statistics prove it. That is the statistic I use. It's a 6% of the world's population are on. It uses 60% of the world's resources. It's looking for a bigger cut. The figures may vary a little bit, but it's essentially. I'm using up resources by the United States at 20 times the world average. We have been tempted recently to try to help what we call the underdeveloped nations, or the developing nations, by bringing them up to our standard. I think it's quite clear at this point there aren't resources enough on your to withstand that kind of assault. The alternative, I think, now I'll try to point some ways to it in the course of the evening,

is that we start lowering our standards, not of living, not of life, but perhaps of collecting. I establish a new way of living that drains the resources of the earth much less than ours do now. That's the first thing to do to start controlling population in affluent white America, or a child born to an affluent white American will use about 50 times the resources of a child born in a black ghetto. The buck starts right here. It's up to us to do something about it. I won't give you the usual crisis notes from all over. I think that you at this point read about them. You know that there is an environmental crisis. I think we all have our theories about why it leaks the present intensity it has. I'm still satisfied in my own way of thinking that we feel the way we do about the crisis simply because we see the end of the road coming, the road that we've been traveling.

We see how we are at long last on a very limited planet. I think the view we got back in