Daily Inspiration Quote by David R. Brower

Brower’s line lands like a courtroom objection disguised as a joke: if you’re going to justify poisoning the future in the name of responsibility, then at least do the absurdly democratic thing and ask the future how it feels about it. The punch is the time scale. “Next 20,000 generations” takes nuclear waste out of the tidy realm of policy memos and drops it into geological time, where our usual moral math breaks. The humor isn’t cute; it’s prosecutorial. It exposes how “keep” functions as a euphemism, a comforting verb that pretends radioactive waste is heirloom china rather than a lethal inheritance.

The intent is to ridicule a particular kind of technocratic optimism: the idea that containment equals closure, that you can warehouse a problem long enough for it to stop being yours. Brower’s subtext is that “for the use of our descendants” is propaganda-grade spin, a narrative that reframes burden as benefit. He refuses the sentimental alibi. Future people aren’t beneficiaries; they’re involuntary custodians.

Context matters: Brower, a central figure in modern American environmentalism, spent decades translating ecological risk into moral urgency, especially as postwar industrial power promised clean progress while externalizing costs. Here he’s doing what effective environmental rhetoric often does: collapsing distance. By forcing readers to picture an impossible poll, he underlines the asymmetry at the heart of nuclear waste policy - present-day convenience secured by centuries of unpayable obligation. The line works because it turns intergenerational ethics into a practical question we can’t answer, and that impossibility is the indictment.