George Miller: “Reclaiming my time, that is exactly the point. If you leave it in that fashion, and if you take the Mississippi River as…”

“Reclaiming my time, that is exactly the point. If you leave it in that fashion, and if you take the Mississippi River as the example, if all of the States and all of the cities do not contribute to cleaning up the river, then it makes no sense for anybody to contribute to cleaning up the river. If we look at the Great Lakes, if the cities on the Great Lakes don't clean up their discharge, then it makes no sense for any of them to do it. Who goes first? When do you do it? That is why you have the unifying effect of Federal laws, because our actions in California--we think most of the pollution in the Grand Canyon is coming out of southern California, so here we have taken one of the great assets of this Nation, and we have destroyed it in terms of its beauty and the ability to enjoy it for visitors all over the world and our own citizens. However, it is not about what happened in Arizona or New Mexico, it is about what happened in southern California. That is why you cannot let this simply be a local determination. We had that before and we lived among the worst pollution in the history of this country.”