Douglas Tompkins

I'm sort of half-Chilean at this point anyway, half-Argentine. This is where I have been living and working for a long time now. ”

If you take guys like Exequiel Bustillo, the architect who designed the early park infrastructure in Argentina, or the great American architects, these guys had a vision that thrust the national park idea into the public eye. ”

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. ”

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. ”

Resource efficiency is the wrong metric. We should use nature as the measure, using nature's wisdom as a template for our economic systems. ”

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. ”

I learned from my parents that you have to get pleasure out of what you're doing, or don't do it. ”

These parks are our life's work, not the clothing chains we created, selling people clothes they don't need. ”

National parks are the best expression of social equity that there is. It's like paying our rent for living on the planet. ”

I don't want to see anything natural get hurt. ”