Political Quotes

“there is a reason why 800 conservation organizations, every U.S. Secretary of Interior from Babbitt to Zinke, and the President of the United States, President Trump, support the legislation we are going to be voting on at about noon tomorrow, and that is because, in my view and in the view of many others, it is the most important piece of conservation legislation this country will have passed in at least half a century. And why is that? It is because it takes nearly $14 billion--up to $14 billion--over the next 5 years from energy exploration on our public lands and spends it to cut in half the deferred maintenance backlog in our national parks, our national forests, and our national refuges, and also to rebuild Indian schools. In addition to that, it does something that Congress has been trying to do for 60 years, since the midsixties. It permanently funds the Land and Water Conservation Fund, which supplies to both the Federal Government and States money to create national parks and routes to fishing access and to other places in the country that we all treasure. In the middle of the Great Depression in the 1930s, the people of eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina looked around and said: Why are all the national parks out West? Well, it was because the Federal Government owned a lot of the land out West and carved a bunch of it up to make national parks--Yellowstone, Yosemite, Grand Canyon, and other places that we know.…”