Earl Blumenauer: “First, as bad as this Texas environmental legacy is, and it is, as the gentleman pointed out, awful, what concerns me…”

“First, as bad as this Texas environmental legacy is, and it is, as the gentleman pointed out, awful, what concerns me more than anything is somehow Governor Bush's lack of urgency about this. Where is his outrage about what has happened to his State in the last 6 years that he has been Governor? Where are his initiatives to try and do something about it? I find the lack of passion on the environment inexplicable, and it is something that I think ought to be of grave concern to every American. This, after all, was something that was recognized as a national treasure by that radical Republican Governor, Dwight Eisenhower, in 1960, when he started setting aside these unique lands for protected status, America's Serengeti. The gentleman has pictured on that beautiful scene of the plain some of the large caribou herds, 130,000 of them, that calve and rear their young on that coastal plain, that provide subsistence to indigenous people that have a right to rely on that, and could be destroyed by the disruption of the herd.”