Douglas Tompkins Quotes
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There's no doubt whatsoever that there's no future in capitalism. It's probably no more than 500 years old, and it's demonstrating over and over again that it is destroying the world.
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If you just hold your cell phone for 30 seconds and think backwards through its production, you have the entire techno-industrial culture wrapped up there. You can't have that device without everything that goes with it.
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The computer is a mechanism for acceleration: it accelerates economic activity, and this is eating up the world. It's eating up resources, it's processing, it's manufacturing, it's distributing, it's consuming. That's what the computer's real work does, and it does that 24/7, 365 days a year, non-stop, just to satisfy our own narrow needs.
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When they're growing up, if you tell kids God exists, they believe it. It's the same with the techno-cultural society. They believe in it - that it's the road to paradise, that there are no limits.
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If you're trashing your own country, ruining the soils, contaminating the waters and the air, cutting down trees, overfishing the lakes, rivers and oceans, you're not much of a patriot.
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These parks are our life's work, not the clothing chains we created, selling people clothes they don't need.
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Deskilling devices - they make us dumber. We're immersed in a system that now requires the use of a cell phone just to get around, just to function, and so the logic of that cell phone has been imposed on us.
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We choose the national park idea because it's really the highest form of protection for landscapes that exists under current law, especially in Chile and Argentina.
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If you want to destroy the planet, you can kiss social justice goodbye. The earth comes first.
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Every single national park had some component of private philanthropy.
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I just realized at least what I was doing was making a lot of stuff that nobody needed and pushing a consumerist society. So I went to do something else.
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There's big granite walls up toward the Argentine border, but the weather's serious, and a lot of the rock is mossy and wet.
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I just feel lucky that I somehow escaped from the confines of the business class... I feel so fortunate that somehow I managed to break out of that world and get to do something that really had more meaning.
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As we get sucked more and more into the technosphere, we become less and less capable of understanding it because it becomes a technological milieu that we're in.
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Capitalism doesn't function when it starts to contract, and we can see that quite clearly right here in the eurozone. It's like pushing a giant monster under water that's gasping for air. It goes nuts.
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Capitalism may have all sorts of things that are good, but ultimately, it's bad for everyone.
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Once we establish an architectural style in each park, we stick with it religiously and comprehensively so that it comes out as a gestalt.
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Resource efficiency is the wrong metric. We should use nature as the measure, using nature's wisdom as a template for our economic systems.
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It is really your behaviour that determines whether you're a patriot.
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When we began working on Parque Pumalin, rumours flew that we were establishing a nuclear waste site for the United States or, oddly for Episcopalians, which we both are, setting up a Jewish state. It would be funny if these theories weren't being taken very seriously.
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I don't think capitalism can survive.
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I've never, ever tried to make life easy for myself.
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It's very complicated when you are reorganizing territories under different ministries. We have to get them all together and transfer jurisdictions. It's a bureaucratic slalom course we have to ski through, but it can be done.
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If you're not willing to take the political heat, then you shouldn't get into the game of land conservation, especially on a large scale.