Pop Quiz on Environmentalism Quotes

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Martha’s Little Pop Quiz is divided into two parts: pre-1980 and post-1980. I’m going to read you an actual quotation from an actual person and ask you two questions:

• Which party did the speaker belong to?
• Who said it?

If you think you know the answer, feel free to speak up. But be careful… there are some trick questions here!

Let’s start with six pre-1980 quotations:

1. “To waste, to destroy, our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the land… will result in undermining in the days of our children the very prosperity which we ought to hand down to them undiminished.”
2. • Which party did that speaker belong to? Republican
3. • Who said it? President Theodore Roosevelt

4. “Wild beasts and birds are by right not the property of the people who are alive today, but the property of unborn generations, whose belongings we have no right to squander.”
5. • Which party did that speaker belong to? Republican
6. • Who said it? President Theodore Roosevelt

7. “When I hear of the destruction of a species, I feel just as if the works of some great writer had perished.”
   Republican: President Theodore Roosevelt

8. “At this sunset hour, the canyon walls are indescribably beautiful, and I fear the magic of photography can never record what I see now.”
   Republican: Senator Barry Goldwater, widely known in the 1960s as “Mr. Conservative”

9. “The 1970s must be the years when America pays its debt to the past by reclaiming the purity of its air, its waters, and our living environment. It is literally now or never.”
   Republican: President Richard Nixon (said in a speech on January 1, 1970)

10. “Nothing is more priceless and more worthy of preservation than the rich array of animal life with which our country has been blessed. It is a many-faceted treasure, of value to scholars, scientists, and nature lovers alike, and it forms a vital part of the heritage we share as Americans.”

    Republican: President Richard Nixon (said at the 1973 signing of the Endangered Species Act)

Okay, here are seven post-1980 quotations:

1. "Trees cause pollution.”
2. 1. Which party did that speaker belong to? Republican
3. 1. Who said it? President Ronald Reagan

4. “When I see a tree, I see paper to blow your nose.”

   Republican: Congressman Don Young of Alaska, said when he was Chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee

5. “If you can’t eat it, can’t sleep under it, can’t wear it or make something from it, it’s not worth anything.”
   Republican: Congressman Don Young of Alaska, said when he was Chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee

6. “Environmentalists are a socialist group of individuals that are the tool of the Democratic Party. I’m proud to say that they are my enemy. They are not Americans, never have been Americans, never will be Americans.”
   Republican: Congressman Don Young of Alaska, said when he was Chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee

7. “The Environmental Protection Agency is America’s Gestapo.”
   Republican: Congressman Tom DeLay of Texas, now the House Majority Leader

8. “Fifty-five percent of Republicans do not trust their own party to take care of the environment.”
   Republican: Trusted GOP Pollster Linda Divall, reporting back to Newt Gingrich and other Republican leaders in 1995.

9. “The environment is the single biggest vulnerability for the Republicans and especially for George W. Bush.”
   Republican: Trusted GOP Pollster Frank Luntz, reporting back to President Bush and other Republican leaders in 2003.

Yes, as I said before, there are some tricky parts to my little quiz. The quotes are all by Republicans. And while they are not indicative of the attitudes of all Republicans in office, either before or after 1980, they do reflect a visible shift within the Republican Party away from protecting the environment and conserving natural resources. That shift became evident—as illustrated in those quotations I just read to you—more or less around 1980, the year that Ronald Reagan was elected president.

And there’s another reason why I think that year— 1980—is significant… especially since I’m speaking tonight to a crowd that includes both college students and college professors.

I’d like to ask you to raise your hand if you, like me, were born before 1980. Now, please raise your hand if you were born in 1980 or later.

That’s relevant for what I want to talk about tonight, since most of today’s college students were born after 1980, which means they don’t have any personal memory of the days before Ronald Reagan and James Watt. They may not even know who James Watt is.

Let me ask three questions just of the students in the audience tonight. Professors, please keep your hands down!

1. How many of you know what role James Watt played in the Reagan administration?

2. How many of you understand why his name would even come up in the context of a talk like this one I’m giving tonight?

3. How many of you personally remember when he headed the Interior Department?

Here’s a more generic question: How many of you college students have personal memories of a time when the GOP was the acknowledged leader on environmental issues?

Not many, obviously. And I really do believe that’s unfortunate, because it means that the only Republican Party that you young adults know from your own personal experience is a Republican Party led by men like James Watt. The only Republican Party you have ever known is run by a staunchly anti-environmental cabal that came into ascendancy after 1980. That’s not the Republican Party that I grew up with, and it’s not the Republican Party that many older Republican voters feel comfortable with.

There are a few things that we “old-timers” tend to forget. (And by “old-timers,” I mean folks like me and your senior professors who actually, personally remember when Barry Goldwater was “Mr. Conservative” and when Richard Nixon was “Mr. President.”)

We old-timers tend to forget that young adults have no memory of the “Grand Old Party” of Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon. You young adults have no memory of a time when Republican leaders enthusiastically voted for and signed into law the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Endangered Species Act, National Environmental Policy Act, and Environmental Pesticide Control Act. Those good years for the environment—and those pro-environmental Republican actions—are literally ancient history to most college students of today.

We old-timers tend to forget that young adults don’t remember when nesting bald eagles crushed their own eggs because there was so much DDT in their systems that the eggs they laid couldn’t take the weight of a mother bird.

We old-timers tend to forget that young adults never saw America’s rivers and streams foaming up with mounds of phosphate-laden soapsuds that smothered all the fish and frogs and salamanders and crustaceans that had previously flourished in their waters.

We old-timers tend to forget that young adults have no knowledge of the time when our rivers, lakes and streams were filthy with heavy-metal toxins, garbage, and raw sewage. You young adults weren’t here when factories, power plants and cities across the country routinely dumped untreated wastes willy-nilly into America’s waterways. You weren’t here in 1967 when Cincinnati’s Cuyahoga River caught fire and burned, not quickly for a day or so, but on and on and on for at least a week on our nightly news shows. I was a junior in college that year, and I can tell you… those nightly pictures of the burning Cuyahoga River made a tremendous impression on me! If you weren’t around in those days, if you didn’t share that experience, that infamous moment in American history, it’s hard for you to imagine the amount of commitment, money, and political will that it took to clean up our nation’s waters to the level of cleanliness that they are today. And I say that with full recognition that the Bush EPA says that 40% of our waterways today still aren’t fit for swimming and fishing.

Unfortunately, for lack of a personal memory, many young adults who consider themselves “conservatives” seem to believe that the laws that to a large extent cleaned up our air and water, protected our endangered species and preserved our finest natural lands are somehow the product of a “liberal” federal government run amok. That simply isn’t true.

Many of today’s self-described “conservatives” seem to believe that since our air and water are so much cleaner than they were back in the “bad old days” of the 1960s and 70s, there’s no more need for all those pesky federal regulations. Let the market handle it, they argue. Let local communities control it! Leave it up to the voluntary good will of industry! Get the government off their backs!

Well, as someone who has a strong personal memory of the days when laissez faire “market forces” polluted everything in sight, I know that approach won’t work any better now than it did when I was a child.

Most unfortunate of all, in my humble opinion, is that many of today’s self-described “conservative” young adults think that if you care about protecting the environment and conserving our natural resources… you are supposed to be a Democrat. Conversely, they think that if you’re a Republican, you have to be anti-environmental.

Hey, guys… that’s not true to our Republican history! That way of thinking is nothing but bunk!

For over a hundred years, the Republican Party was THE leader in environmental protection and natural resource conservation. Do you need proof? Here’s an impressive time-line of factoids for you to consider:

1864: The first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, took this country’s first steps toward protecting natural land by protecting Yosemite.

1872: Republican President Ulysses Grant signed a bill establishing Yellowstone National Park.

1891: Republican President Benjamin Harrison signed legislation establishing the forest reserves, the forerunner of today’s national forests.

1903: Republican President Theodore Roosevelt established Pelican Island National Wildlife Refuge. Over the course of his presidency, TR protected over 230,000,000 acres—an area equal in size to Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin combined. He quadrupled the land in national forests, invented the National Wildlife Refuge System, created fifty-five refuges, and proclaimed eighteen national monuments, including 870,000 acres of the Grand Canyon and 640,000 acres of Mount Olympus. Roosevelt even dispatched the Marines to protect Midway Island’s albatrosses from poachers.

In the early 20th Century: Republican President Calvin Coolidge saved 1,380,000 acres of Glacier Bay National Monument, and Republican President Herbert Hoover saved 850,000 acres of Death Valley National Monument.

1960: Republican President Dwight Eisenhower set aside the vast coastal plain now known as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

1964: the never-say-die efforts of Republican Congressman John Saylor of Pennsylvania resulted in passage and signing of the Wilderness Act.

1968: Congressman Saylor’s efforts culminated in the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act.

1970: Republican President Richard Nixon established the Environmental Protection Agency and appointed a tenacious Republican environmental advocate named Bill Ruckelshaus as its first administrator.

1973: Republican President Richard Nixon signed into law the Endangered Species Act, which had passed both houses of Congress with overwhelming bi-partisan support.

And that is just a quick sample.

Very often along the way, the Democrats opposed the Republicans’ conservation initiatives, mostly out of fear that it would hurt labor. Often it was far-sighted Republican leaders who argued for protecting America’s resources for future generations. That was the GOP of yesterday…a truly conservative party. I believe it should also be the GOP of today and tomorrow.

Okay, that leads me to tell you about the organization that I started in 1995. Its official name is REP America, with the R-E-P being an acronym for “Republicans for Environmental Protection.”

REP's mission is “to resurrect the GOP’s great conservation tradition and to restore natural resource conservation and sound environmental protection as fundamental elements of the Republican Party’s vision for America.” In other words, we’re out to “green up” the GOP.

We like to say that REP is the environmental conscience of the GOP. Last year, Sierra magazine published an interview with me in which they called REP America “the environmental conscience of a party that may not want one.”

Another wisecrack is that “Republicans for Environmental Protection” is an oxymoron. Yeah, some of you thought that too, didn’t you? Well, as I’ve been trying to show you this evening… it’s really not. The GOP has a long and proud history of supporting environmental protection and natural resource conservation. Why… even in today’s polarized political environment, there are hundreds of Republicans in Congress and the state houses who carry on the GOP’s great conservation tradition.

Wherever I go, I like to point to local Republican leaders like Michigan’s own former State Senator Joe Schwarz, who shares this podium with me tonight. Senator Schwarz built a great track record in your state legislature and continues to take a strong leadership position on mercury pollution. I’m also proud to turn the spotlight on Republicans like Michigan’s own Congressman Vern Ehlers, who has such a fine record in the House of Representatives that we brought him into REP America as a member of our Honorary Board. And I’m proud to talk about GOP environmental heroes of the past, like former Michigan Governor Bill Milliken… another member of REP America’s Honorary Board.

To go back to Teddy Roosevelt for a moment… While he was president, TR made another statement that we at REP America have come close to making our own slogan. President Roosevelt said:

“I do not intend that our natural resources shall be exploited by the few against the interests of the many.”

Roosevelt’s line resonates with us because not since his time has the Republican Party seemed in greater need of “greening up.” Not since his time have the extractive industries laid such a big claim to America’s bounty and had that claim reinforced so wholeheartedly by the administration in power.

Can any of you imagine the current president of the United States saying something even remotely akin to: “I do not intend that our natural resources shall be exploited by the few against the interests of the many.”

No, I can’t either. But I do hope to live long enough to hear that kind of statement from a Republican president, and I’m working hard for that goal, too… through REP.

Some of you may be surprised to learn that there’s a Republican organization that not only says things like what I just said, but which also advocates strict enforcement of landmark federal laws that protect our air and water, our public lands and our endangered species… and which isn’t afraid to hold GOP officeholders accountable when they don’t enforce those laws. Well, it’s true. Believe it.

REP works in a variety of ways. We educate our members on key environmental issues. We hold conferences and workshops and bring in exciting speakers to fire our members up and get them ready to go mano a mano with their state representatives and Congress Critters. We publish issue-specific op-eds and letters to the editor. We give speeches. We spend a lot of time nagging GOP elected officials to do the right thing.

REP is still young and small, so it doesn’t have money for lots of staff or DC lobbyists. Our members are mostly rank-and-file voters, so they don’t carry a mass of clout. And since we’re scattered around the country in hundreds of congressional districts, we don’t yet constitute a critical mass of voters in any one district.

But we do have one trick up our sleeve that we use to great effect: We speak up as Republicans, and we tell the unbiased truth about the actions of our party.

REP focuses its attention solely on the leaders and elected officials of the Republican Party. It operates under the carrot and stick principle. When GOP bigwigs do good work for the environment, we praise them vociferously. We send them thank-you notes, and brag about them in letters to their local newspapers, and write op-eds and Green Elephant articles about them, and do whatever we can to help them in their next election.

Conversely, when Republican elected officials don’t do the right thing for the environment, we aren’t at all shy about voicing our displeasure. We use the same tools… personal notes, op-eds, letters to the editor, and Green Elephant articles taking them to task for failing to live up to the GOP’s great conservation tradition.

We realize that only when the leaders of both major parties take up a cause do the American people see meaningful, permanent progress. So we are driven to restore the environment as an important issue for both Republicans and Democrats. As long as one party takes the environmental vote for granted and the other party ignores it, we’ll continue to see our hard-won gains eroded by shortsighted politicians of both parties. We must make both Republicans and Democrats compete for our support and hold both parties accountable for their performance.

The obvious corollary to that argument is that as long as the environmental community routinely backs one party and demonizes, ignores, or gives up on the other, we’ll never make the environment a two-party issue.

It’s too easy to surrender to the grim reality of one “green” party and one “brown” party. Whatever good may be done by the “greens” when they’re in power can be undone by the “browns” when the cycle turns and they take power back. If you doubt that, just look at what has been happening in Washington, DC, over the last few years, to the detriment of our national forests and parks, clean air standards, conservation budgets and the public input provisions of the National Environmental Policy Act.

One thing is certain: That happy state of bipartisan competition for our votes won’t become reality if we conservationists give up on the GOP. We absolutely must support pro-conservation, pro-environmental Republicans now in office and help others like them get elected.

And there’s a practical reason why conservationists of all political stripes should be glad to see a Republican membership organization like REP gaining strength. With our growing numbers and our powerful Conservation is conservative message, we offer the perfect foil to the rants of Rush Limbaugh and others of his ilk. We cut off at the knees their absurd claims that only “liberals” and “wackos” care about protecting America’s natural heritage. Through our website, our Green Elephant newsletter, our speeches and op-eds, and our efforts on behalf of green Republican candidates and office-holders, we provide a major counterweight to the anti-conservation extremists.

We at REP America are working toward the day when both parties will compete to be environmental champions. Given where the GOP is at this moment, that will take some time. But if I didn’t think it could happen, I never would have begun this endeavor.

So, in closing, I would ask you—whether you’re a student or a professor—if you’re a Republican who cares about the environment, make sure your GOP representatives hear from you. Be sure they know that you’re a Republican who wants strong environmental protection initiatives. Praise your GOP representatives when they do the right thing, but don’t ever hesitate to take them to task when they don’t. Remember: they work for you, and you have a right to set high expectations for them.

I would also ask—whether you’re a student or a prof, a GOPer or a Dem—if you know any conservation-minded Republicans, please tell them about REP. Pick up a Green Elephant and a brochure to take to them. Send them to our web site: www.rep.org.

I hope you’ll take a look at our web site yourself. There’s so much more than I would like to tell you but don’t have time to say tonight. You’ll find a wealth of information at rep.org. And be sure to take a copy of REP’s brochure and Green Elephant newsletter for yourself.

Thanks for your time and attention.

http://www.rep.org/opinions/speeches/43.html

[웃 910]

[one...two...tree 2,762]

Yes, Joseph - that professor has failed to get through your thick skull.

[Pinocchio Liberal 268]

Yes, Joseph - that professor has failed to get through your thick skull.

Beats the ** out of a squishy one!

[DeadPoolX 9]

To be fair, the situations that existed pre-1980 and now exist post-1980 are quite different in many ways. That doesn't mean either philosophy is "right" but instead acknowledges the times and circumstances were different. It's also a good idea to remember that many quotes are often taken out of context. Without knowing the entire background behind the quote (or even the full statement from where the quote was pulled) using it is fairly meaningless.

Edited November 10, 2009 by DeadPoolX

[Joseph & Ana 0]

Yes quoting a handfull of people from different eras displays a "shift"

Don't talk to me about statistics anymore, as you obviously know nothing about them.

I like Teddy Roosevelt's approach to it. He definitely wouldn't be for totalitarian government control over the behavior of people in the name of healthcare and climate change. His quotes are inspiring, not forceful.

Everyone I know cares about the environment. We all have shortcomings in our personal behavior, but we all care about it. Who doesn't like clean air, and clean water? Education, not Authoritarian governments, is the answer. And i dont' mean indoctrination into the church of Global Warming. I mean education on alternative fuels, better behavior, better observation and conservation. Global Warming doesn't even have to be mentioned to achieve that.