Political Quotes

“I rise to speak on the crisis pending before the whole State of Arizona. Arizona has never had a tragedy like this Rodeo fire. It has now consumed an area 10 times the size of the District of Columbia. It has burned at least 200 homes, probably more. We can't go back into areas that have been burned because it is still too hot. It has destroyed a lot more buildings than that, and animals, both domestic and a lot of the animals that populate our beautiful forests. People who are not familiar with Arizona might not understand how there can be a forest fire in Arizona. But the world's largest ponderosa pine forest stretches from the Grand Canyon into New Mexico, across a rather wide swath of Arizona at an elevation of about 7,000 feet. It is beautiful country, with pine trees, aspen, fir, spruce, lakes, rivers--not the kind of environment you would ordinarily associate with Arizona. It is a place to which many Arizonans repair during the summer when it is very warm 'down in the valley,' as we call it. It contains some of the most interesting and unique habitat in the United States--habitat, both flora and fauna, which is not preserved by wildfire but is absolutely and utterly destroyed. You might be interested to know that an area not far from this-- 75,000 acres--burned a couple years ago, and it was the largest black bear habitat in the whole United States.”