DOUGLAS TOMPKINS

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.

I've never, ever tried to make life easy for myself.

Conservation is not without its critics and opposition. There are a lot of special interests that don't want to see land set aside.

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.

If you want to destroy the planet, you can kiss social justice goodbye. The earth comes first.

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.

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.

There are emotional relationships in any business.

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.

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.

The Canadian power line is going to industrialize Patagonia, and it is going to discount the one economic card the region has to play, which is the tourism.

Fashion is one of the most intellectually vacuous industries. We had to manufacture desires to get people to buy our products. We were selling people countless things that they didn't need.

I'm short on celebrations and long on getting to work.

I don't have a cell phone because I know how horrible it is. Using your cell phone is like putting your head in a microwave every day.

Capitalism may have all sorts of things that are good, but ultimately, it's bad for everyone.

Every single national park had some component of private philanthropy.

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.

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

I know all of the antiques stores in Buenos Aires. I've been in every one of them, picking things out.

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 feel a strong bond with Chile and Argentina.

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.

I have even begun to think that I am caring for Argentina and Chile perhaps more than Argentines and Chileans. I feel like I'm sort of a de facto citizen, because I am looking after their national patrimony - which is the land - very carefully.

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.

National Parks are the gold standard for conservation.