Daily Inspiration Quote by David R. Brower

Brower’s line lands like a slap at the era’s favorite fantasy: that “progress” is just a matter of clever hands on the right levers. The machinery here is the natural world, but also the modern technocratic mindset that treats rivers, forests, and coastlines as adjustable settings on an industrial dashboard. His blunt insistence on ignorance is not a put-down of individuals so much as a diagnosis of a system that hands amateurs the controls while pretending the manual exists.

The repetition - “There isn’t enough…” - works like a drumbeat of limits. It drains the usual optimism out of engineering talk and replaces it with an ethic of restraint. Brower’s subtext is that humility isn’t a mood; it’s a survival strategy. When he says “ordinary people,” he’s aiming at the comforting democratic story that any well-intentioned public, any elected board, any local booster coalition can safely “tinker” with dams, fire regimes, pesticides, or extractive projects and then tidy up the consequences later. Nature, he implies, doesn’t do refunds.

Context matters: Brower came to prominence fighting big, mid-century development schemes, especially dam-building in the American West. Postwar America was intoxicated by mastery - concrete, grids, megaprojects - and often framed dissent as anti-modern sentimentality. Brower flips that script. The sentimental position, he suggests, is believing the planet is simple enough to be fixed by trial and error. His intent is a warning dressed as plain speech: the larger the machine, the less room there is for casual experimentation.