QUOTES
"What
we are fighting for is not just the fishes and the birds. We protect nature not
for nature's sake but for our own sake because it's the infrastructure of our
communities, and if we want to meet the obligations of our civilization and our
culture which are to create communities for our children that provide them with
the same opportunities for dignity and enrichment as the communities that our
parents gave us, we've got to start by protecting that infrastructure; the air
that we breathe, the water that we drink, the landscapes that enrich us. We're
not protecting nature for nature's sake. We're protecting it because it enriches
us, yes, it enriches our economy and we ignore that at our peril. But it is also
enriching us aesthetically, recreationally, culturally, historically and spiritually.
Human beings have other appetites besides money. And if we don't feed them, we're
not going to grow up…we're not going to become the kind of beings that our creator
intended us to become."
The
environment is the most important, the most fundamental, civil-rights issue....
Four out of every five toxic-waste dumps in America is in a black neighborhood.
I
don't even consider myself an environmentalist anymore. I'm a free-marketer. I
go out into the marketplace and I catch the polluters who are cheating the free
market...
We
are living in a science-fiction nightmare where children are gasping for breath
on bad-air days because somebody gave money to a politician. And my children and
the kids of millions of other Americans can no longer go fishing and eat their
catch because somebody gave money to a politician.