58 Quotes by Denis Hayes

An acre of windy prairie could produce between $4,000 and 10,000 worth of electricity per year - which is far more than the value of the land's crop of corn or wheat.

The easiest way to make something cool is to get cool people to do it. Part of this might mean the president has to forget tensions with opponents, or people like Arnold Schwarzenegger who has actually been decent with oil issues. Maybe he needs to pull some of the cool people in and make them model the right behaviors.

When we held the first Earth Day, everyone said it was a success because of the huge turnout. It was probably the largest planned event across the country.

We got everyone's attention, but we didn't solve any environmental problems.

The more subtle thing is more speculative. The world is well past its long-term carrying capacity for human beings living a European, much less an American, lifestyle predicated on planned obsolescence. International economic growth is largely a matter of accelerated movement of materials from mines and forests to the dump. Instead of saving and buying decent furniture we can pass on to our children, we charge our credit cards for shaped heaps of sawdust and glue that fall apart in less than three or four years.

There really wasn't an environmental movement 30 years ago. The Sierra Club national office in 1969 consisted of one full-time volunteer.

The sunshine that strikes American roads each year contains more energy than all the fossil fuels used by the entire world.

Zeroes are important. A million seconds ago was last week. A billion seconds ago, Richard Nixon resigned the presidency. A trillion seconds ago was 30,000 BC, and early humans were using stone tools.

he economy favors throughput over quality and craftsmanship, and economists are terrified because the American savings rate has crept upward from about zero to almost five percent. But the mortgage crisis and the burgeoning credit card crisis are causing Americans to become wary of irresponsible debt.