Political Quotes

“2 days ago we celebrated Earth Day, a holiday that began in 1970, when Senator Gaylord Nelson recognized the growing public movement that we now know as environmentalism, and called on environmentally concerned citizens to join him in cities around the world to demonstrate, teach, and learn about preserving the world's natural wonders. Speaking on that occasion, Senator Nelson said of the first Earth Day, "It may be the birth date of a new American ethic that rejects the frontier philosophy that the continent was put here for our plunder and accepts the idea that even urbanized, affluent, mobile societies are interdependent with the fragile life-sustaining systems of the air, the water, and the land." Today, we have accomplished many of the goals of the first environmentalists: Cleaning up rivers so polluted by industrial waste that they burned, and air polluted with lead, mercury, and sulfur. But there are still many pollutants that we have not eliminated, and we have come to realize that pollution is not a local problem, but a global one as well.”