Tulsa Junior College, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Speech Video, c.1993

A video of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. speaking to an audience at the Metro Campus of Tulsa Junior College during the Issues and Ideas Lecture Series, circa 1993. The speech centered on environmentalism.

Good evening, my name is Diane Hembry and on behalf of Tulsa Junior College, Metro Campus Student Activities, I welcome you to the final offering of the 1993-94 Issues and Ideas Lecture Series. A graduate of Harvard of University, and the University of Virginia law school, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has a reputation as a defender of the environment. He has been involved with the litany of legal actions concerning the prosecution of governments and companies for polluting the Hudson River and long Island Sound, arguing cases to expand citizen access to the shoreline, and bringing law suits against sewage treatment plants to force compliance with the clean water act. Mr. Kennedy is a self-made nemesis of big time polluters. As a senior project attorney for the natural resources Defense Council, a privately funded advocacy group in New York, the second son of Robert Kennedy is carrying on his father's tradition of crusading against the powerful. Now in his eighth year on the job, Mr. Kennedy has filed more than fifty lawsuits and oversees several cases. His most noticeable victory came in 1991, when he won a case against New York City for pumping pollution into the Hudson River. Receiving his Master's degree in environmental law in 1987, Mr. Kennedy has become a leader and expert in the protection of the rights of the environment. A dynamic and compelling speaker, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. emphasizes the challenges that lie ahead and offers pragmatic suggestions for dealing with such issues as global warming, the greenhouse effect, and water pollution. Please join me in welcoming Mr. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. [Applause] Thank you very much. Can you lift the house lights just a little bit? I’d like to see the audience. I’d like to be able to see if people start leaving. I like to be the first to leave on these. But I'm really glad to be here. I love coming to Tulsa and I've been here a number of times during, I guess, the last three or four years and to this part of Oklahoma. To me it is one of the prettiest places in the country and you're very lucky to live here. [Applause] The last time I was here I spoke right here to Town hall, I think three or four years ago. I’ve been to Tahlequah since then, but I spoke to town Hall and it was a little bit older audience than this I think, but I've been speaking more recently to college audiences. I point out that cultural phenomena because wherever I've gone, when I was growing up, people have said to me, and have reminded me like Diane just did, about my relationship to my family and they say “Oh, I remember your father, your Bobby’s son or your Jack’s nephew, Ted’s nephew, or your Joe's brother”or whatever. I started recently going to talk to colleges more and more often and I hear people say more often than not, “Oh your Arnold's cousin!” It’s a change in priorities, but I'm also am happy to speak to a college audience because these educational institutions, this is where change really begins in society—historically, all over the world. Real, revolutionary change that’s occurred in almost every country anywhere in history has been generated, really, from college campuses and in my days at college the large issues of the day were the Vietnam War and civil rights movement and the change that we saw around those movements really came off the college campuses. And those issues were really the products of entrenched attitudes among a much older generation weren’t malicious but they just wanted to see change if it came in an evolutionary way and the younger people said well we don’t need to carry that baggage, we’re not going to be constrained by that narrow vision. We are going to create our own world and they did something that was considered revolutionary and that's the kind of attitude we need with the environment. This is probably the biggest battle that humanity has fought in its history and we really need revolutionary change and we need it soon. In particular, we need a change in the way that we regard our ownership of the environment, the way that we enforce our laws around the environment and the way that we think about it. Particularly the way we think about the future and plan for the future. The Iroquois Confederation, which is a large Indian Confederation in New York State, had a tradition that they would take major decisions in the long house and their elders would meet there. They wouldn't make any decision that was a significant decision without first considering the impacts that decision had on the seventh generation and we can learn something from that today. We make decisions and we seldom consider the consequences in our society past the next election and we need to start planning better for the future. It’s something that we can do as individuals, it's not something that we do very well as a society or our political dynamic doesn't really allow us to do it. I was in Hanford, Washington last year and there are thousands of acres out there that are contaminated with a substance called Iodine-99 that is deadly, absolutely deadly. It has a half-life somewhere around 16 million years and you wonder about the mentality of contaminating an area with that stuff. Human beings have only been on the planet for 25 thousand years and our oldest ancestors are about two million years old, so we're creating things that are going to have consequences far beyond the reach of history. Some of the decisions that we’re making today will impact life on this planet for periods of time that are a thousand times the length of recorded human history, but almost all of the decisions we’re making as the political dynamic don't really take into account future generations even a few years into the future. When I was in third and fourth grade I’ll give you an example, I went to a school called Our Lady of Victory School in Washington DC and this was during that time of the Cuban Missile Crisis and a year or two thereafter and we had to do a drill every week in school which was an atom bomb drill and we were told that if we saw the flash of a nuclear weapon go off or that if we heard the air raids sirens that we should avert our eyes and turn towards the interior wall of the building because if we looked at the flash, we would go blind and that when the reflected light began to dim we should turn back to our desks and move the sharp instruments, the pencils and the compasses and put them inside the desk and then we would do something called duck and cover where we’d put our head below the desk and our head between our legs and hold our legs together and wait for the blast to come and a wind would come an blow the windows out at the school and after that there would be a momentary calm in during which we would all stand and file in an orderly fashion into the basement where we would stay the next six months or whatever. And we had to bring the fruit cocktail to school and canned stuff that we were going to be eating and it is funny to look back on that today but I can look back thirty years later and see that as a justifiable result—a reaction to those fears of Soviet aggression nuclear annihilation—we have today in 1994 created a world where today about seventy five percent of the scientists who are employed on the face of the earth are employed in weapons technology, where fifty cents out of every dollar that we spent in taxes that is American goes to servicing either a military debt or military budget and where we still spent about a trillion dollars globally a year on the military. That’s two hundred dollars for every man, woman and child on the face of the earth. Now, if I wait another thirty years and I ask my children I have a boy who is nine years old. He’s about the same age I was during the Cuban missile crisis and if I ask them can we continue to allocate these kind of resources to disruptive technologies and still have something left that’s worth preserving? Their answer’s going to be no. It’s going to be instinctive and it’s going to be instantaneous because they're growing up with a whole different set of priorities and their priorities are primarily driven by environmental change, the erosion of the top soil, the contamination of drinking water supply, the destruction of the ozone layer, global warming, air pollution, acid rain, the acceleration of cancer incidence in our society, lead poisoning the destruction of species as a whole parade of horribleness that you can read if you get direct mail from environmental groups but this stuff is now making of the front pages of our papers and they're aware of that. That generation my kids generation they already know about all of this stuff and it's a concern of theirs. My daughter who's just turned five years old one of her first words when she was one or two was compost that's the word that I didn't know until I was thirty and by my son gets furious at me if I leave the car running. He says dad you’re wasting gas. I had a friend who I was talking to about that phenomena the other day about the children and their value system and how it's different than ours and she said that her kids were like eco cops and that she was relieved when they went away to camp and she could start putting glass back into the garbage cans again. But they're growing up with those values and my kids didn't get it from me their getting it from their peers more than anybody but also from their elementary school teachers, from television sets from Nickelodeon from all these different sources but they know that these are the issues that are going to dictate their quality of life. So, thirty years from now they’re going to make these decisions and they’re going to make them right. The problem is that if we wait that long it's going to be too late because the most important decisions in the history of mankind are going to be made during the next two decades and they’re going to be made by our generation and the way that we make them is going to dictate—is either going to narrowly constrain, preserve their ability, our children's ability to make significant or viable choices during their lifetime and we have the ability today if we exercise it. We have the ability to save the environment most critical areas in the environment. Any of you who have watched the Gulf War on TV saw these missiles that we can build that are fired off a ship twelve hundred and fifty miles over the desert they negotiate through the dunes and then go down somebody's chimney or through their front door and they film the whole thing you have to believe that a nation that can design and deploy those kind of miracles and industrial sophistication can build a sewage treatment plant that works and we can build a car that gets 40 mpg [Applause] And we can do those things and we've been able to do them for a long time. The problem is we've allocated our resources our brainpower and our money in another direction and what we've got to do now is we’ve got to wrench it away from there and we’ve got to take from those traditional uses and put it towards preserving the life support systems of this planet so that our children can have a decent place to live and we need to do this not only for the future but we need to do it if we are going to create an economy, a workable viable economy today. I've heard a lot from a whole wave of people, reactionaries who were attacking the environmental movement, Rush Limbaugh among them, leading them really that talk about how we have to just choose now between whether we're going to have a good economy whether we are going to have jobs in the environment. That's not a true choice. In almost a hundred percent of cases, good environmental policy is identical to good economic policy. If we want jobs, sustainable jobs that last for long term and that are going to provide a sustainable economy for years to come. We've got to base those kind of jobs on strong environmental protection. It’s true that in this country we have had environmentally destructive subsidies to certain occupations and now we are thinking about withdrawing those subsidies because they have destroyed ecosystems and there's very little left of them and there's a complaint that jobs are going to go with it. We have, for example, if you live in in the state of Idaho you can get on to public lands and raise your cattle on public lands for two dollars an acre, but your neighbors will charge you nine dollars an acre. That means that the taxpayers is subsidizing that activity to the tune of seven dollars an acre and you are going to put all of your cattle on the public lands because it's much cheaper that way and that destroys the public lands. They're selling trees now in the Songus (?), two thousand year old trees—we are—we own the Songus (?) All the trees—all the old growth forests on private plans have been cut down, there's none left. The struggle in the Pacific Northwest is over public lands, lands that you and I own. And we are subsidizing the lumber companies. Over the past ten years the forestry service has lost 5.6 billion dollars in subsidies to foresters who are going up there and cutting our trees that are premium and they're cutting trees that are two thousand years old that they sell for ten thousand dollars and were charging them a dollar and seventy cents a tree. If they went on to private land they would have to pay the price of the real cost of that tree and the real costs of those roads going in there and what we're saying now is there's only ten percent of these forests left—it’s really less than one percent if you look at it from the east coast of the West but there's ten percent of the Pacific old growth left and were saying shouldn’t we preserve something for our children. These are our cathedrals for this nation and shouldn’t we preserve some of those and find other ways to occupy the people who are now involved in cutting them and we're paying for them. The same is true of western mining the eighteen seventy two mining law which governs mining on public lands again on our lands allows anybody who wants to go dig a mine on public land. It’s the first use the primary use and they don't have to clean up their mess. In the state of Montana there are twenty thousand toxic waste sites on public lands that the people of Montana now have to pay a billion dollars to clean up that’s a subsidy to the mining industry. These are environmentally destructive subsidies that are allowing an economic activity to take place, but we're paying for them and it is a very expensive jobs program it is not an efficient jobs program. If that's how we want to create jobs, that's not an efficient way to do it. A billion dollars to create a couple hundred jobs is not a good buy for the money the same is true on how we allocate water and how we allocate a number of the other resources. Particularly in the western state. In the East we have subsidies but what I call it is pollution based, prosperity based on pollution, pollution based prosperity. Where we allow a company like General Electric to dump its PCB’s into a river for many years in order to support a couple hundred jobs in the factory rather than cleaning up its PCB’s itself and attaching the cost of that to the product of its making. Instead it puts those PCB’s on the rest of society to clean up and we experience it we experience that cost in health effects. We have more cancers in New York because they're doing that. We have fisherman out of job downriver. We have a lot of water purveyors’ cities that have to provide water from the Hudson River to their consumers that now have to build much more expensive plants because there's PCB’s in the river. So that’s a subsidy to the polluter and if you look at these industries that are being protected now that are sacred cows. They’re almost all industries that we as a society are financing and at a great loss and it is not an efficient way to use money also if we want to continue to exercise leadership in the global economy we have to base our economy on strong environmental priorities. The nations with the strictest strongest environmental laws are going to be the nation's that dominate the global economy. We have a, give you an example, we have a Clean Air Act that was passed during the waning months of the Bush administration and it’s a good act. But it’s going to force our utilities and corporations in this country to spend somewhere between twenty five and fifty billion dollars installing scrubbing equipment in their stacks to clean them of various kind of air pollution. Virtually a hundred percent of that technology is gonna be purchased from Germany. Why is that? It’s because Germany has a tougher Clean Air Act than we do and they’ve been enforcing it for the last twelve years and we haven’t been enforcing ours. And as a result, their businessmen, their entrepreneurs, and inventors, and scientists came over to this country and bought up our technology because it was American inventors who invented almost all of this stuff. They brought it back to Germany, they developed the products and now they're selling them back to us at a premium and they’re going to make billions on it. I have a lawsuit that I won two days ago against New York City that’s going to force the city to spend about three billion dollars cleaning nitrogen from its sewage discharge. It has killed long Island sound and it's costing a lot of money—six billion dollars a year in fishing—in lost fishing because of the cost of that debt from the sewage treatment plants in New York City. Now they have to fix those plants. The technology that they're gonna use, they’re going to buy from Japan. It’s a technology called Ring Lace (?) and the Japanese are gonna make billions on it. And that technology was invented in this country by an American inventor but we weren’t enforcing nitrogen removal standards over the past ten years and the Japanese were. So they purchased the product, they own it now, and they're selling it back to New York City for about three billion and—and in the next ten years, probably to every city in this country that has nutrient (?) removal problems—which virtually all of them do. So they're gonna make billions and billions because they had the environmental laws that required them to clean up first. And if you look all around the world you'll see that the nation's with the strictest, strongest environmental laws are beginning to dominate the theory of the economy. Environmental technologies are the single fastest growing element of the world economy. The Europeans are going to spend 3.5 trillion dollars on them over the next seven years. We’re going to spend 1.3 trillion in this country. Nobody knows what the third world is going to spend—but it's gonna be a lot. And if—and these are the jobs that are going to replace the jobs that we’re losing in IBM, and Boeing—in the automobile manufacturers—they’re going to be environmental technologies. The US has been in the position to take leadership in all of these areas. Photovoltaic cells, solar energy, energy conservation, sewage treatment, air pollution, landfills—all of them we were in the lead ten years ago. Today we are lagging in most of them. The only one we continue to lead is landfill technologies. We make the best landfill technologies on earth and we’re now marketing them all over the world because we produce the most garbage. But it had—but it is an economic plus for us. It’s a subsidy. And people have to stop looking at environmental regulation as something that decreases the wealth of our nation. It doesn’t. What it does is it transfers wealth from the polluters who’ve been taking advantage of us all for many years to the pollution stoppers who are the basis of a new industry that is gonna employee Americans for many years to come and then it’s gonna be the biggest growth industry in the planet. So it's important for us to understand that connection and not accept a kind of simple slogan about “You have to choose between jobs and the environment.” If you look at the reality you’ll find that just the opposite is true. I want to talk a little bit now about “move to the local” and specifically the kind of things that I do on the Hudson River. And some of you might say “Well, the Hudson is twelve hundred miles away from here why do we need to know about that? But it’s something that—it's a success story. It’s something that we've done right. And the fight to protect local environments is really…that is the environmental battle that we’re going into. All of us have to take responsibility for our backyards. And on the Hudson we've done something that is really a success story, that can be transported anywhere. I work for a large national environmental group called the Natural resource Defense Council which is like a big law firm that does just environmental cases. And I represent—almost exclusively—Hudson River fisherman who operate a program called the river keeper and the river keeper operates a patrol boat up and down the river that goes up and down the river looking for polluters. And I run—at pace University law school, which is my full time office—a clinic where I’ve eight or nine students that are permitted by a special court order to practice law under my supervision as if they were attorneys; they can do everything a lawyer can do. And the patrol boat goes out and finds polluters, we give each of the students a polluter to sue at the beginning of the semester; they file complaints, they do notice letters, they do discovery, they negotiate, they go to court to argue the case. Of course if they don't win the case, they don’t pass the course. And, we've been very successful at bringing these cases and at protecting the Hudson River—but not only that. We had—our program has become now so successful that is being duplicated on river systems all over the country: Long Island Sound now has a keeper, the Delaware Bay, Kattskill Bay in Maine, the Chattahoochee River, and Georgia, Santa Monica Bay in Los Angeles, San Francisco bay, Puget Sound—all have keepers, most of them working with local law schools based on my project, which really makes like a little law firm that has the river as its client that will use the law to protect a water body. And it’s been very successful. I started doing this about ten years ago. And when I first started doing it, I knew very little about environmental law—I was trained as a criminal lawyer where I went to law school, at the University of Virginia, there wasn't—there was only one course offered in environmental law and it was taught grudgingly out of a loose leaf notebook, because there were no textbooks at the time. I went back to law school in 1985. So, to night school to get a Master's degree in environmental law at Pace so that I can be a better advocate for my client. And when I started cracking these new textbooks—there's now a dozen of these big textbooks—but one of the first things I realize is that the fastest growing areas of the law—faster even than bankruptcy, which is in second place. And there’s twelve large general-survey textbooks. When I first started opening them, I was surprised to see how much of the black letter jurisprudence—the case law that we use to protect the environment from one coast to this country to the other—how much of that was generated on the Hudson River. And that's because the Hudson has been blessed since the early 60s with an extremely vigilant, vigorous, aggressive, and sophisticated environmental community that has been willing to go to war to save the river—to hire lawyers to go into the planning board meetings, to go into court, to do whatever needed to be done to protect the river. And as a result, we’ve not only succeeded in protecting the Hudson under tremendous—against tremendous odds, but we've also generated this law which is now being used to protect the environment all over the Americas. One of the first cases—in almost every case book on environmental law—is the Storm King case. Storm King involved a proposal—1965—by Con Edison, which is our electric utility in New York, to build a pump storage facility at the top of Storm King Mountain in the Hudson Highlands. Storm King Mountain is one of the most beautiful geological sites on earth. It's a sugar loaf mountain that rises directly out of the river fifteen hundred feet into the air. And Con Ed proposed—it’s so beautiful and so spectacular that during the 19th century it became almost an obligatory subject for the Hudson River school of painters—Thomas Cole, Frederick Church, Samuel F. B. Morse—they all went down there at one point or another. I bet if you went over to the Gilcrease that you can find pictures—paintings of Storm King because almost all the Hudson River school painters that one time or another went up there and painted its portrait. And it was—Con Ed proposed—so it was well known all over this country and Europe—it’s façade, its visage—Con Ed proposed to blast a six billion gallon reservoir out of the rock at the top of the mountain and drop a pipe that was forty foot diameter down the front of the mountain, defacing it—about the width of the stage—into the river into one of the most productive zones of the river where there were billions of fish during certain times the year. And during the evening hours when people in New York City were using a lot of electricity and Con Ed had a surplus in its wires, it would use that surplus to suck water up out of the river and fill the reservoir the top of the mountain. Then in the morning, when the subway trains were turned on and people switched on their electric stoves and their television sets and their air conditioners, Con Ed would pull the plug on the reservoir and drop the water back down through the pipe. It would turn turbines inside the pipe, which would generate electricity that they can sell to the city. Now, it would cost them three megawatts to suck the water up the mountain but they would only gain two megawatts by dropping it back down, but they could sell those two megawatts of peak rates for a lot more money, so was an economic decision for the utility. But they produced a consulting report that said that the little fishes and the and the fish eggs and the fish larva that would be sucked up by the billions would not be harmed by being dropped six times the height of Niagara Falls—through bladed turbines and back into the river. So, many environmental groups have problems with the report and we brought a lawsuit and the lawsuit lasted for fifteen years. And in the end the utility withdrew its proposal to build the facility and we say Storm King but the most critical outcome of that law suit came after only two months of litigation, where a three-judge panel and the second Circuit Court of Appeals—the Federal Court in New York City—said that environmentalists have standing to sue. Now “standing” is a concept in American law that comes to us from the British common law and from our own Constitution. And it says that you can’t sue somebody unless you can show that you have a concrete stake in the outcome of that lawsuit. You can—you have to show that the defendant’s activities are going to injure you somehow, that they’re gonna damage your property, or your livelihood, or your health. You can’t sue somebody for burning down your neighbor's house. You have to show that your house was somehow damaged. And that is how—that is why the concept of “standing” had kept the environmental groups out of court for many, many years. For example, if somebody said—if somebody came up with a proposal to fill the Arkansas River with old automobile tires and we decided we wanted to sue them, we would go into to court and say to the judge “We wanna stop this project,” the judge would say to us “Well do own the Arkansas River?” and we’d say “No, of course not” and the judge would say “Then you don't have standing to sue. Get out of the court.” That's what happened to every environmental case prior to Storm King. In Storm King, the judges said that if you live on a resource—if you hike on it, if you canoe on it, if you fish in it or swim in it, if you walk by it occasionally and it does something important for you aesthetically or spiritually— that you have standing to sue a polluter who was going to defile it. And that was the first time that had been said in the history of any kind of American law, British law any law. It is now the law of the land. It's been upheld—that concept— in a series of cases in front of the Supreme Court. And it’s been enshrined in a dozen federal statutes by Congress and we now bring lawsuits based on that concept every day. But Storm King is the case that allowed that to happen. It is the foundation of our environmental law in this country. And there’s been a whole series of seminal cases that come out of the Hudson River: the general Electric case, where we sued General Electric for dumping PCPs into the river, even though they had a permit from the state to do it, and we won. The Westway (?) case, where we stopped a multibillion dollar highway that would destroy the river. Indian Point Power Plant case, where Indian Point was killing a million fish a day. Con Ed, again. The nuclear power plant—we forced them to redesign the plan to stop killing fish and we also forced them to put twelve million dollars to create a special foundation that does nothing but study and research and try to preserve the Hudson River. There's now a thirty seven million dollars net in that foundation that we've gotten from polluters and it generates a lot of money every year that used to protect the river. So Hudson is the only river that I know of that has its own endowment. The Exon (?) case—there’s a whole lot of these cases. I’ll just mention one more –I love to talk about it, because they're all great stories, but the Exon case was one of the first cases I came in on where the river keeper caught Exon corporation bringing these seven hundred foot tanks—been doing it for years—up the Hudson River. They were offloading their oil in New York and coming up the river and stealing fresh water and then going down and using the fresh water in their finery in Aruba (?). But they began sending these tankers up empty just to steal freshwater and they were selling it to tourist hotels around the Caribbean because most of the Caribbean islands have water shortages. So, if any of you were in the Caribbean prior to 1984 and you were particularly in the Dutch Antilles and you went into a tourist hotel swimming pool you can probably say that use woman the Hudson River, because almost all of that river was—all that water with Hudson River water that they were that they were stealing. And we were able to stop them and we've made a big settlement with them and—uh—but there's the whole series of these cases. Why is it we spend so much of our time protecting this river? It's not a big river, it's not a really important river from a size perspective or economic ratio compared to the Columbia or the Mississippi. It's only three hundred miles long. Why do we spend so much time there in resource? It’s a couple of reasons. One is that for professional environmentalists like me, it's in my own backyard. And environmental ethic dictates that we’ve gottah take care of our own backyard first. About twenty percent of my time, I spend doing international issues—protecting ecosystems, and working with the Indian people, and Canada and Latin America—protecting large ecosystems and wilderness areas. But I can't go up to British Columbia or Northern Quebec and tell those countries— those provinces—“You gottah stop building dams or cutting these trees.” Or go down to Ecuador, or Chile and say “You gottah stop burning these rainforests” without those countries saying to me—those government saying to me—with a lot of justification “How can you talk to us? You're an American. Look what you've done to your country. Look what you’ve done to your wilderness areas, your rivers and streams. Look what you’re doing to your las last forests today.” But we can point to the Hudson River. And we can say here's a resource under tremendous population and industrial pressure and yet we’ve managed to keep it clean and green and preserve its biological integrity. It's a model for ecosystem protection. It's a success story. It's something we've done right. The other reason that we protect it is that it is just an extraordinary resource. It's a beautiful river, despite its small size in its three hundred mile length from the Adirondacks down to the battery at the base of Manhattan. It has more geological diversity probably than any other river that size in North America. It starts up as a very productive trout stream up to the Adirondacks a beautiful lake, Lake Tear of the Clouds, and it quickly matures into a roaring whitewater River where my father used to take me and eight or nine of my brothers and sisters white water rafting when we were little. It goes down through the plains of Albany, past the distant vistas of the Catskills, on the right bank in the Berkshires, on the left and then through the Hudson Highlands-that’s where Storm King is—Fjord-like mountains rising out of the river, past the Red cliffs, the Palisades on the Jersey side, and out past the spectacular island of Manhattan and the vast wetlands of New Jersey. But the real key to the Hudson's importance is that it's an estuary. Now, does anybody here know an estuary is in Oklahoma? Yes. [Pause]Oh, Good for you, good for you. Well, you still have to answer the question. What? Does anybody know what one is? That's good. Let’s give them a hand. It’s an inland arm of the sea where the tidal salt water from below meets the fresh water currents that come in from the rivers and streams above, and these are among the most productive ecosystems on earth. The Hudson is tidal. It's a sea level hundred and fifty miles upriver—way past Peakskill—thirty miles north of Albany. It rises four and a half feet with the tides twice a day and drops four and a half feet, the same as it does in Manhattan right near the Atlantic an odd because it's the sea level the salt water from the ocean below is constantly pushing to get up river in the fresh waters from the rivers and streams above are battling to get down and that mixing zone which is called a salt line advances and retreats up and down the river with the precipitation and the peculiar mixing invites a lot of animals into the estuary that you wouldn't normally think of as being in a river system. We get whales in the Hudson. We almost always get dolphins during the summer. We almost always have seals in the river. I was out with a commercial fisherman last March under the Tappathee bridge just north of New York City in and some of them caught a seal in their nets but that's very common in the river but the real key to an estuaries importance is that if they are spawning—a vast spawning and spawning grounds and the reason is that as a nutrient trap every leaf that falls off the tree anywhere in the watershed—the watershed in the drainage basin Hudson's fortunes thirty thousand miles for mine Massachusetts Connecticut New Jersey and large parts of New York state every leaf that falls off the tray anywhere and that watershed organic to try a discounted or that swept the fields of the forest floors during the spring rains minerals the are scoured from the fast flowing streams of the Adirondacks the Catskills the Berkshire, all of that material ultimately makes its way into the main stem of the Hudson River in there instead of flushing out to sea as it would in a river system, it sloshes back and forth with the tides for a year before slowly breaking down first by the fungus sunlight and by the micro bacteria the bacteria and gradually by tiny invertebrates in the early spring and in that form it becomes available as food to the young of the year of the anadromous species of fish at the very moment they need it. Now does anybody know what an anadromous fish are? Somebody is nodding over there. Well—this is important—every American should know this. Um, and it’s going to be on the quiz afterwards, anadromous fish live their lives in the saltwater they have to come into the fresh water to spawn. Can you name any? Yes—salmon, shad, Sturgeon, herring alewise, and striped bass are the most important commercial species. Seventy five percent of the fish that we eat in this country come out of the estuary and most of those are anadromous fish, and they come up into the estuaries in the early spring and they go up they have to lay their eggs and fresh water because the salt will kill them. They go up into the freshwater stream where they started out as an egg, and they millions of eggs and they come in by the millions and millions of female striped bass will lay six million eggs, and there are millions of striped bass in the river in the early spring. And those eggs will float down for a couple of days in the fresh water current and hatch. For the first week of their lives they're known as yoke sack larva and I go down with my children to Senaskco Beach—right under Sing Sing prison and crawled right under Sing Sing prison with a saying that you drag along the beach during the early spring it will catch a lot of these little fish and bring them home and put in an aquarium and if you watch them their time – and they’re only a sixteenth of an inch long—if you look at them at that age they don't really look like a proper fish they look almost like a pregnant woman their long thin and they have big protrudaments on their stomach and that is their yoke sack. that and that's what they're feeding off of but if you look at them in the aquarium, they will drift around with the current and ill be nipping little bits of suspended particulates suspended solids out of the water column and spitting them back out and they look like they’re eating, but they are not eating because they are absorbing those yoke sacks, but they are just practicing eating. But after a week, that yoke sac is gone, and they need to begin feeding in earnest and during that narrow window of time in the early spring when suddenly you have trillions of fish in the river all of them suddenly hungry and needing something to eat almost miraculously all of that organic materials suddenly turns into food for them, and that is the phenomenon that is known as bio-synchronism, and it happens a thousand different ways every day in estuaries to maximize the productivity of the system and that's why these systems are so critical because they are the foundation of the food chain in the oceans. They are the cafeterias of the oceans. If you injure the estuary by filling its wetlands or building a golf course next to the banks or putting your sewage or waste into it, you don't just hurt what happens in your backyard. You impact what happens a thousand miles out at sea with the big pelagic species, with the tuna fish and the goldfish that we also used for food in our culture and never have to come near the shore during their life cycle but nevertheless they rely each year on the productivity of those estuaries, so that’s the reason we spend so much time protecting them. If you were to walk into the Hudson River you would be astounded by the amount of life in it. You can’t do that because it's dirty. It's supposed to be that way if you look, in fact, that's all the nutrients that are being turned around in it, but there are rivers and streams the four up into the Hudson up into the Hudson from all up and down it’s banks and some of those are as clear as the Caribbean, and I often go walking or hiking or snorkeling or swimming in those for fishing and even scuba diving and some of them and you can get an idea of what the river would look like if you could look into the river. One of my favorite again as the Crotin River which is near Sing Sing, and I go in the early spring time. I put a scuba tank on and go into this—there's a little old pool called Quaker Rock that’s about maybe a third the size this room—12 ft deep and I go there during early spring and there's a current that is usually going through there very fast up with a tank on and go down and grab a big rock stabilize myself in the current and then just sit on the bottom for an hour and watch this pool fill up with fish. It’s extraordinary because the bottom of the Crotin is carpeted with barnacles so you feel like you're in a marine systems like an ocean you’ll see eel grass growing everywhere, blue crabs and green crabs scuttling along the bottom, the water column is filled with fresh shrimp, and almost every little crevice has an eels head poking out of that to filter feeding. You can see oysters up that form the Hudson as well, and in the early spring a few tens of thousands of herring and ale wives turning the whole river silver and making it gleam followed by these giant striped bass which come up this spawn themselves and to forage on the alewise (?) and little snapper blue fish little baby blue fish from the ocean I used to catch them—we called them Skip Jacks—as a boy off to Cape Cod, and I fish with my children now I’ve never seen them in fresh water before, but you can see them in large numbers in the Crotin, and you can see them hitting May Flies next to the trout—brook trout, brown trout, rainbow trout—large mouth bass the form of the season freshwater fish- catfish, bullheads—we have goldfish in the Hudson get up to four pounds. In fact, there’s a guy called Everton Nack in Clabrack, New York that makes part of his livelihood trapping Hudson River goldfish for collectors because they are so huge. We also have carp which is a giant goldfish it is a kind of goldfish and they come into the river in the early spring again when you see them they cast a shadow over fifty or sixty pounds there used to be a big filter fish fishery for the Jewish population in New York from the Hudson River because we have these giant carp and it’s because of the PCB but they look like a giant goldfish they have a big mustache called a marble and we also get a lot of tropical fish in the Hudson because the Hudson is hydraulically connected the Gulf stream and so you can see sea horses and you can see Atlantic meta fish and a little fish called a star gazer if you touch it'll give you an electric shock and I come out of this pool not only struck by the diversity of species but by the sheer abundance how many fish fit into such a small place. I've never seen anything like it anywhere in my life and the Hudson is abundant and it’s abundant at a time when all the other estuaries on the east coast of North America are dying the Caroline estuaries the Roanoke, the tar, the new river all of them are dying from acid rain and from farm runoff. Likewise the Chesapeake Bay is dying. It used to be the most productive water body on earth. Eighty percent of the fish on the East Coast came out of the Chesapeake. Now there’s seven species of the fish that are going extinct there. The north of that is the Delaware that still has a dead zone at Camden New Jersey and Philadelphia from sewage discharges north of that is the Hudson and north of the Hudson is long Island sound which is dying. Last summer half the water in long Island sound was dead water. Zero dissolved oxygen the lowest levels ever recorded. The fin fish had to leave the area or perish the barnacles, the crustaceans the animals that couldn’t leave simply died. This is a tragedy that I feel with particular poignancy because I grew up on Cape Cod which is part of a hydrology of Long Island Sound and there were species that I knew as a boy that are gone today, that are extinct, and that my children will never see. There's no smelt left in long island sound. You used to be able to scoop them out with a bucket. The blue crabs are gone and when I was a boy I could go down to any little embankment and catch enough blue crabs to feed part of my family anyway. The razor clams, the steamers that made New England famous they're gone and they were in every mud flat on long Island Sound when I was a boy and at low tide, slack tide you could scoop them up with a rake in a bushel basket and fill at least a bushel basket up on any type. They’re gone. The flounder catch is down from forty million pounds five years ago to a million pounds last year. The oyster catch is down from three million bushels a year to fifteen thousands. this a huge system that is in collapse and it's really tragic if you read the old accounts of what long Island sound used to be like when the Europeans first arrived here. The original explorers, the freeze, Henry Hudson all of them described a paradise they thought it was in Eden. An explorer describes traveling up the East River and parting the huge schools of fish like a comb through hair. He called them salmon they were really probably striped bass. All of the explorers three of the original explores describe aromas that they could smell out of sight of land from the flowers that surrounded long Island sound the shores and two hundred bird species that were there when they first landed that most of them are gone today. During the eighteenth century there were enough lobster that washed ashore every night from natural die offs to fertilize all the costal farms in New York and Connecticut and during that same time there were riots in Massachusetts prisons because the prisoners were so sick of eating lobster meat. If you can imagine that and New Yorkers were eating more oyster meat than any other kind of meat because we had a fish called the East River oyster that had a shell a foot long’ eleven inches long and it had seven pounds of flesh and its extinct today. We’ve lost a lot in long Island sound but Boston Harbor they're all dying to St Lawrence Seaway which is the last large one to the North. Last year beluga whales ran ashore the St Lawrence had to be incinerated as toxic waste because there were so much toxics in there body and that’s because it drains the chemical sewers of Lake Ontario. A problem that’s getting worse not better the Hudson is the only river left on the east coast of North America and actually in the entire North Atlantic and I’ll throw in the Mediterranean, the Baltic Sea, and the Black Sea. the Hudson is the only one left with strong spawning stocks full of historical species of fish all of the other ones have been killed or have been wounded some of the mortally and that's why we protect because it's Noah's Ark it's a species warehouse if we are going to ever come to our senses and stop putting stuff into the waters that kill them and injure us we'll have the stocks of fish that we can bring back and re plant in all these other estuaries. What happens when we destroy an estuary like long Island sound or like the Hudson or when we drive the species into extinction? That to me is one of the worst things that one generation to commit against another. I come from a religious tradition that teaches me that man was given dominion over nature but there we were also given obligation of stewardship and what does it say about us as a generation. When half the species on the planet go extinct during our lifetime and that's what we're looking at today and that's what will happen if present trends continue because of the destruction of the most productive habitats on Earth. The tropical and temperate rain forests, boreal estuaries, freshwater and saltwater wetlands, and coral reefs and some others. What happens when we destroy these things clearly there are economic impacts and I could talk about those till the cows come home? As I said we're losing six billion dollars on long Island sound. This is the first economic downturn we're going through in New York now in the history of our country. when a man lost his job in New York couldn’t put a fishing pole over shoulder and go down to the shore Manhattan or to on long Island sound or the Hudson River, the East River and pull a big striped bass to bring it home to his family for dinner because the strippers have PCB’s and you can’t eat them without taking a big chance of giving your family cancer and during the great depression in the thirties, thousands and thousands of people flocked to the river and they found employment. It was an economic safety net. It’s gone today. there's a lot of subtle and interesting ways that we are really undermining our economy at every level, by destroying our environmental resources but there's other costs besides the economical there's agricultural costs most of our cereal crops for example are derived from rain forest species and were wiping out the rain forest and in doing so we destroy the inventories that we could use to hybridize new drought resistant disease resistant more productive strain. There’s medical impact, again twenty five percent of the drugs in a typical pharmacy here in Tulsa come from rain forest species and today we are destroying those inventories. A couple of years ago some scientists went to Madagascar and they came back with a plant called the rosy Perry Winkle and they derived a drug from that plant that today is the primary cure for childhood leukemia and for Hodgkin's disease. when I was at our Lady of victory school a classmate of mine died of childhood leukemia as did everybody at that time it was a death sentence for everybody that died and today eighty five percent of the cases of childhood leukemia are put into remission by this drug that is derived from the rosy Perry Winkle and today the rosy Perry Winkle is extinct in the wild and eighty five percent of the plants in Madagascar will be extinct in the next fifteen years. We got Rosy Perry winkles growing in greenhouses in this country we have been in the Caribbean and Florida growing wild but not in Madagascar and the other plants we haven't brought we haven't even inventoried them and today we could be losing the cures for cancer, for AIDS, for diabetes for some forms of mental retardation and we won't even know it and we’ll never know it because we haven’t an inventoried those species. But there's other costs well there’s cultural and spiritual cost. I want to just talk about a delicate subject for some but I want to address them directly and talk about it for the remainder of this talk, the next few minutes because this is an area all of us should understand what we’re losing. Particularly it's important for Americans because we have a greater connectedness to nature than any of the other major industrialized countries on earth. The Europeans destroyed their wilderness a thousand years ago we're still in the process of destroying the last of ours and we have an enormous psychological and spiritual connection to it. It’s not an accident that this country invented the National Park. We didn't have the great cathedrals and the monuments of Europe to memorialize so instead we chose to memorialize the handiwork of God and our cultural institutions and political institutions are derived from nature. They grew out of it almost organically. Frederick Jackson Turner was our first great American historian he said that in America democracy came out of the forests. Without the great wilderness areas in, other words, we would never have developed the institutions that govern our daily lives in the way in the form in which we develop them and that theme has been echoed by our most visionary political leadership throughout this nation's history. Thomas Jefferson was a great nationalist and architect, the author of the declaration of independence of our Constitution. One of his first acts as president was to send Lewis and Clark out to the western reaches of this nation to inventory the wildlife there. Not just the big commercial species like the bear and the bison, or beaver but to collect insects of flowers and minnows and plants because Jefferson saw that as a national security issue. He thought if we would know ourselves as a people if we were to know what our national destiny was to be, we had to know as much as possible about the nature out of which we were derived and this definition of the American character a lot of that the Hudson has played an important role in defining that aspect of the American character. Alexander Hamilton wrote the initial, one of the first Federalist papers while he was on the Hudson River sloop, the blueprint for the American democratic system. The Democratic Party the oldest political party in the history of mankind was founded in seventeen eighty nine when Thomas Jefferson and James Madison came up the river up the Hudson River for a botanical expedition up to upstate New York. Jefferson later wrote a book about it called the flora and fauna of North America. They floated back down the river, they landed in Manhattan and they met with Aaron Burr and the Knights of St. Tammany and the Democratic Party was formed the modern architect of the Democratic Party is Franklin Roosevelt who had his house in Hyde Park overlooking the estuary he collected birds. He had been up there, I was up there this fall looking at his bird collection which is still astounding by modern standards. He drew his inspiration from the abundance of the river the same as Washington had done from the Potomac chest. The Republican party as well the modern paradigm of Republican virtue was Teddy Roosevelt. During the last election, President Bush repeatedly said “I’m a Teddy Roosevelt Republican.” Teddy Roosevelt was the quintessential nationalist. He wrote books about the Western mammals that are still regarded as scientific classics. He spent his latter days exploring the Amazon. He opened up Rondonia with Colonel Rondon. In the areas that are being burned today looking for new the species there. he almost died in the endeavor and he would have died if his son Kermit hadn’t insisted that the party go back and rescue him and Roosevelt was in a fever demanding to be left behind but if you go to the American Museum of natural history in New York City as I've done you can find today salamanders that are pickled in alcohol. They were collected by Teddy Roosevelt when he was a boy on the banks of the Hudson River in garrison new York. Of the political leadership the most visionary among them was really influenced by nature by our connection to it. Also great writers in this country almost without exception looked at nature as the critical defining element of American culture. Nathaniel Hawthorne, one of our first world-recognized writers, wrote this series of books that really said it well where he talks about or he describes the relationship between the original Europeans who landed here in the American wilderness and how they feared it and they loathed it. They thought if they went into the wilderness they would descend into kind of savagery, the scarlet letters a good example. The Puritans stockade themselves in these tiny villages, communities along the coast and they looked towards Europe and their values and their direction and they were frightened of going into the wilderness and their sanction for any in their community who violate their European morality is expulsion into the wilderness and the adulterous woman, who becomes pregnant mysteriously and has to wear the scarlet A, she is cast into the wilderness and she builds a little house there and she has a child which is this delightful little girl. The only creature in the book with any joy and the child, in Hawthorn's view, is probably the first modern American—a melding of European experience and the American wilderness and two generations after the events described in that book you have Emerson and Thoreau come along who had kicked off the traces of the European heritage and they embrace nature as a spiritual part of every American. And they say that if you're American and you want to hear the voice of God you have to go into the woods and listen to the rustle of leaves, the songs of the birds. And if you wanna see the American soul you have to look into the mirror of Walden pond. And Melville wrote Moby Dick at the same time which is extraordinary on I say it's really it's a it's a metaphor for Jack's owning democracy for the transformation of our country into a first real little man's democracy. I’ll just talk about this for second although really it’s a digression, but Jackson who was a strange character in American history in this state, in particular, has a lot of reason to feel ambivalent about his legacy but Jackson, also was really the father in many ways of modern American democracy. He was the first president that didn't come from the east coast from a rich family, landholders. He came from the heartland of this country. The backwoods of Tennessee and he came down to Washington with his mountain man and his squirrel hunters to transform this nation to the first real little man's democracy in the history of the planet. And Moby Dick is a metaphor for that. He was a very fiery character the same as Captain Ahab was in Moby Dick and this is the great American novel—this is the greatest piece of literature many believe that our culture has produced. And if you remember the beginning of Moby Dick the ship which is the Pequod sitting in Nantucket harbor and it is Morgan's birthday and is something very odd on the fore deck and which is an Indian teepee and even those of you who aren't nautical types would recognize that you wouldn't find an Indian teepee on a whaling ship but the reason it’s there is the Indian teepee at that time was the symbol for Tammany Hall which was the Democratic organization and inside that teepee they have this meeting with the owners of the ship who symbolized the very fiery character like Jackson. In the book he's meeting with the owners of the ship who are on who are instructing him what he should do on this journey the same way as the political bosses instructed Jackson. And when he leaves the harbor, he charts his own course and pursues the white whale which is the symbol of a kind of violence and vitality, but at the same time a kind of sanctity and a mystery and a purpose and a destiny that symbolizes what our nation's about that is melded with nature and the power of the force of nature. And on the ship is a representative of every race that was in America that time there's several American Indians, there’s West Indian, there’s several blacks, there's African Americans, there’s several Asians, there’s an Irishman, there’s Italian, and so on and this is the ship pursuing—America pursuing its—its destiny. And you look throughout our history—Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Jack London—all of them—Melville, Hemingway—all of them describe this tension between civilization and the mayor and the wilderness that comes out in the creation of this new group of people who were Americans that defines our culture and our identity. The art poets too—Whitman and Frost—our artists—that the two great schools of artists we have in this country—the Western school—Remington and Russell and the Hudson River school and all of them painted the stark scenes of nature versus man. The Adirondacks, the Grand Canyon, the Sierra Nevada, El Capitan, Storm King—these great powerful portraits of the most—of the stark—the most powerful scenery in nature. These other nations that have painted natural scenery—the British have their still lifes, the French and Italian have their garden scenes. And the Italian their agrarian scenes. But that's nature tamed. The American artists painted nature in the raw—nature in the wild—because they saw that as the way to capture the American soul. Even our language is drawn from nature. Emerson pointed out that if we were raised on a Moonscape, our language would likewise be barren because so many the descriptive terms and the words that we use are drawn from nature. And if you talk to primitive people, or if you go back in time, language becomes more and more picturesque until, if you go all the way back, it becomes poetry. It's just a series of symbols—all of them taken from nature. And we do that today. We say ‘gentle’ and we think of lamb, we say ‘cunning’ and we think of fox, we say ravenous,’ we think of wolf. But Emerson pointed out that every word that we have in the English language that expresses a moral facts or spiritual fact is taken from nature. The word ‘right’ is taken from a word that means ‘straight.’ The word ‘wrong’ is taken from a word that means gnarled or twisted. The word ‘spirit’ is taken from a word that means ‘wind.’ The word ‘supercilious’ means raised eyebrow and you can go on and on with it, but it is a connection that has been recognized in exploited by our great moral philosophers and moral teachers throughout history who used parables and allegories and fables taken from nature in order to teach us right from wrong, teach us what the face of God looks. Whether it’s the pagan philosopher Aesop with his fables or whether it's the modern Christian theologian C S Lewis with his Narnia tales, the Confucius, Buddha, the old Testament with the seminal events of the Garden of Eden and Noah's Ark or the New Testament where Christ is born in a manger surrounded by animals, where he finds his divinity while he’s spending—for the first time—only spending forty days alone in the wilderness communing with nature. Where almost all of his parables are drawn from nature: “I am the vine, you are the branches,” the lilies of the field, the little swallows, the mustard seed, the wine skins , the scattering the seed on the fallow ground, and on and on and on and that is the place that he found truth. That's the place that he found the truest vision of God and one that allowed him to continue to renew the faith of the people in him. Because they could see the truth themselves and they were renewed by his explanations of it. And he didn't get out of touch—he stayed in touch by doing that. And there’s the Koran and Muhammad, where the Koran and almost all of the great prophets come out of the desert and come out and their all shepherds. And you can go through almost every religious tradition and find the same thing. I talked to Thomas Barrie, who is a Catholic priest who lived in the Hudson—lived in the Hudson Island. Does a lot of thinking about the environment and spirituality and I challenged him with the most difficult issue in the history of the environmental movement which was the Snail (?)Arctic case. A two inch fish was allowed to hold up for several years the construction of a multi-billion dollar dam project—the Tennessee Tellico dam that was approved by Congress that would've brought jobs and energy to a region in this country that badly needed it. Why did we allow that to happen? How did we get our priorities so mixed up? And he said to me, “Because we understand somewhere inside of us, as Americans, that if we lose a single creature we lose part of our ability to sense the divine—to understand who God is and therefore what are own potential is as human beings.” And that truth is part of almost every religious tradition in the history of mankind. And my own religious tradition, which is Christianity, one of the seminal events after the birth and death of Christ was the conversion of Saint Augustine who drafted the blueprint for our modern thought of how we are good and evil—modern theology—good and evil and life and death and afterlife and the concept of the notion of God. And his conversion took place in part while he was sitting in Milan with his mother, Saint Monica, on their way back to North Africa, overlooking a garden and the two of them found themselves transported upwards in a religious revelation and outside the universe. And as they rose they heard all the creatures on the planet singing the song of creation: we did not make ourselves, but we were made by God. And Augustine understood at that moment that these creatures were not put here simply for us to destroy or to consume or to devour for our biological needs, but they were put here as companions for us to teach us something about the nature of humility, something about the nature of being created beings. Now, when I go into a court room, or when I sit across a negotiating table with—from a polluter, it's often hard to work a lot of this stuff into the conversation. Because these are the currencies that we’re accustomed to dealing with in our political structure, our judicial structure, but nevertheless are critical to our survival. We preserve nature because of what it does for us, because it enriches us. I don't want my children growing up in a world where there are no commercial fishermen, where there aren't people fixing nets and catching fish every morn. We already are too much out of touch with the seasons and the cycles the tides and we live a lot of our life on paper. And we don't get the renewal that you get from—that all of us have experienced from immersing ourselves in wildness—nature. And…you know it enriches us spiritually, it enriches economically in every other way. That's why we preserve it. That's why we preserve—not for nature—we don't preserve nature for its own merit. We preserve it for what it does for humanity. We’re not preserving the spotted owl for its own merit. We’re preserving those northern forests because we believe they're more valuable to humanity standing than they are if they were cut down. And that’s honest. That is—an environmentalist ought to be honest about that—the reasons for doing these things. Because if something is persuasive to everybody and everybody really understands that if you ask the Beaver—you know if you asked other species—why they do something they say we do it for—if you asked a Beaver “Why do you build the dam?” he wouldn’t say “I do it to provide a nice place for the fishes the frogs to swim.” It’d say, “I do it because it's my home and I'm trying to improve it and leave something for my children.” And nature enriches us and that's why we need to preserve it—we need to do it for children. There’s an old Lakota saying that has been appropriated to some extent by the environmental movement that I'll close with that says that “We don't inherit this planet from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children.” And I would add to that that if we don't return to them something that is roughly the equivalent of what we received, that they'll have the right to ask us some very difficult questions. Thank you very much for your attention—for having me back in Tulsa. [Clapping]. Thank you. Now, I’ve got—I’m gonna take some questions. If anybody has some? Yes? [Audience member asks unintelligible question]. Kay, the question is how do you raise the awareness of the community about recycling and other environmental issues? My attitude about that is that you have to pick—you really have to worry about your own awareness and what your own actions are. And the environment, is an every other endeavor, you’re not always successful. And the only way to really deal with life I think is to let go of the results, put as much work as you can into what you’re doing, but let the results go. And what you need to do is take an interest in an area, make yourself an expert in that area, and then go out and use your expertise. And there’s a million ways you can do that in a democratic society: you can show up at the planning board meetings, you can write letters to the mayor, you can get other people to sign petitions, you can make yourself a force in your community, you can take responsibility for your community, you can, if you see something that is wrong—that is against the law (and a lot of people are breaking the environmental law)—you can go find a lawyer and say to the lawyer, “You know, you have to do part of your work pro bono and I'm asking you to do an environmental case.” More and more of them will do that. And oftentimes, just writing a letter to somebody force them to—or, will force them to reconsider what they're doing and to start taking the issue seriously. So, you know that’s what I think—that those are the areas—that’s a general question and that's my general response. [Someone asking another question]. Okay. I was asked to comment on the feasibility of the full cost accounting. I'm not sure know what that is. Does it mean assigning value to environmental harm? [Person answers] Oh, Okay. Full cost accounting—yeah. I mean, that—you know that's essentially what environmentalists are trying to do is to impose market conditions on the environment. We, uh, if you build a—if you make a pair of shoes, the cost of disposing of the tannic acid should be reflected in the product, in the shoes and consumers then can decide whether they wanna buy—accept that price or not. But if you dumped the tannic acid into the creek, which is what used to be done with it, you are not asking the consumers whether it's worth it. You’re not asking society whether it's worth it. You're just asking society to subsidize your production in an endeavor that may be inefficient and it may not be good for society. And what we're trying to do is to impose market conditions on all products and we believe that if you really had true market conditions—if your—if your—if your product reflected the environmental harm the product was doing with the cleanup of that environmental harm, that we would not have environmental problems because the problem is really called…looking at it the other way is called the Tragedy the Commons. If you have a common area that’s used by everybody and there's no accountability, everybody's gonna use it. And they’re gonna use it to death so that you don't have a common anymore. The use of every New England town—and even today every New England town has a common—a large green space where everybody used to be able to go graze their cows for free. And that was how New England communities were structured. And what they found was that within a few years people abused the privilege because there was no incentive for them not to impose their costs on society as a whole they stopped using their own farm yard and then they would bring a lot—there was no incentive to care for the public trust and what we're trying to do now is structure an economy where everybody has to pay their own costs that they impose on the public trust and it just makes sense from a lot of different points of view. Yeah, way in the back. [Someone speaking too faintly] About genetic engineering? [Audience member speaking]. Well…you know, people have been doing genetic—people have been doing genetic engineering for many many many years and since the beginning of, you know, human history they've been doing some kinds of genetic engineering. I mean, the reason we have cats and dogs and cows and horses this really—they're all modern farm animals—are a product of genetic engineering. There’s some genetic engineering that’s going on now where we’re actually splicing jeans and…micro genetic engineering that is worrisome. But I wouldn't say that I would oppose all genetic engineering. That's the best I can answer you. [Someone in the audience speaking] Is this a self-interested question? [Laughter] The question was how great is the need for environmental lawyers? As I said it’s the fastest growing areas of the law. You know…They’re in great demand in New York. I can tell you that and there's jobs for environmental lawyers in the agencies. There's good guy jobs—there’smore black hat jobs available working for inner corporations or corporate polluters. But in others we’re finding—at the school where I teach is one of the premier environmental law schools in the country. And my students have been very able to find jobs even in distended job market. So…[Someone speaking]How would I grade Al Gore? Well, I would first talk about the… So the Clinton-Gore team—I love Al Gore. I think—I love his book. I think he's brilliant. He’s a very, very thoughtful person. But more than that—you know—and him being an environmentalist, he’s a really honest person and he's a trustworthy person and he's just a good—he's a decent man and that's about the best thing. And he's very thoughtful. And he’s just—just about the best thing that you can say about him. He's just—he's a decent person and he's a good person. The record for the administration—their agenda—is a very good one. They have not at this point established a strong track record in accomplishing that agenda. Now, I deal with the agency—federal agency people everyday and there’s a real change. And so on the ground level, in the trenches, you know, we're seeing impact. But the really big things that they were going to do to change the way the public grants are administered, to change the public waters laws, to reform the Mining Act, to reform the way that lumber is sold—those things haven't really—they have not invested a large amount of political capital into that agenda. Their agenda—the stated agenda—is very good, but they have not put—I think they’ve saved their political capital for other programs—for the health care program and for NAFTA. And they have not put their political capital behind environmental programs as of yet. There's one really good thing they did which was the recycling initiative, where they didn’t have to go to Congress. They did it by executive order. And they changed—they required the federal government to spend—to purchase all the paper that purchased by the federal government they require that twenty percent of that the recycled. That is very important. The reason that it’s important is because there is not a huge market out there for recycled paper. And because of that, the facilities, for example, in New York City we have our biggest export—our biggest thing that we ship out in New York City—is used paper. That's the biggest thing. The second biggest thing is used aluminum. But our biggest export out of New York is used paper. And we export it because there's nothing—there's no way for us the process it in New York City. And the reason is because you needed to build a de-inking facility which removes the ink and that's where the bottleneck is and there are very few of them anywhere in the country. And the reason there's very few of them is because the banks won’t loan money to somebody to build one, because there's no demand for recycled paper. And as a result—and they—they can make a huge profit if they're built and if there’s demand they can under sell virgin products by enormous amounts of money, but, instead, we are subsidizing the destruction of our virgin products, our forests. While we have urban forests. We have eleven thousand tons of paper that are being thrown away every day in New York and that paper could supply our needs rather than cutting down new trees. But we’re cutting down new trees cuz there's no de-inking facility. Since the Clinton-Gore people did this executive order a hundred and seventy five million dollar teaching facility has gotten the financing to start in the South Bronx and we are helping it get started and it's gonna employ hundreds of people and we are to be able to start recycling our New York City paper for the first time. But without that executive order, we probably couldn’t have gotten financing. So, it's good. Yes? [Someone speaking to him] The question was about overpopulation and that is the premiere environmental problem—that’s the number one environmental problem—and…we had…when I was born it took—when I was born there were three billion people on the planet. In my lifetime that’s gonna—it took ten thousand human generations to get three billion people. In my lifetime, we’re gonna go up to fourteen billion people and that is gonna stress all of our life support systems. Any gains that we make in terms of cleaning up our water, reducing our use of energy, or protecting—cleaning up our air is going to be eroded by these huge populations. All of our habitat is going to be degraded and so it is the biggest problem. The solution to the problem until—there's a lot of solutions to the problem. Some of them are very complex. I mean we find that if you decrease child mortality, for example, that’s one of the key things you can do to rid to reduce fecundity—fecundity is the amount of children a woman produces. If you can give women in third-world countries the assurance that their children will live, they will—the amount of children they produce will immediately be reduced. The fecundity will be reduced. The other sort of place where a lot of people are working is within literacy and providing opportunities to women other than childbearing to increase their status and to increase their… to give them some kind of fulfilment in their lives. In many countries, for example, Guatemala, where the average family has nine children in it, childbearing really is the only measure of status and the only occupation that is open to a woman. I have eleven kids in my family, but it's hard for me to imagine that any woman who had, you know, who had other alternatives other than my mother would have that many kids, you know? Because it's hard work. But a recent report actually is really encouraging, which is there's a lot of recent data that came out about three weeks ago but from Bangladesh that shows that the simple provision of birth control devices will reduce fecundity enormously. And there was a big program in Bangladesh that was just—people were just giving out condoms and the fecundity level has dropped enormously—very, very dramatically so. That’s something that, you know, the United States has not done a very good job at assisting the UN programs where, in fact, we’ve cut off all funding to family planning for the United Nations. And it's something that we need to get back involved in. It doesn't mean we have to support abortion but it is very, very important to support birth control. And, you know, we're killing ourselves. I have to say, I mean, because some of my views clash with some of the official views of the Catholic Church—but not as much as some people think. But the—you know, I look around I believe that nature is given to us by God to teach us something about how we’re supposed to conduct ourselves, to teach is some wisdom and there are so many instances all around us, throughout nature, of animals breeding themselves out of house and home, and breeding themselves into a miserable kind of existences, and breeding themselves literally to death that it seems to me arrogant for us to believe that that can’t happen to us and I think God gives us these things to teach us things and that we ignore them at our peril. And we have abilities now to reduce fecundity in ways that are humane, that are loving, that are, I think, spiritually uplifting and that all that are not degrading to people, and that don't involve things that are very controversial like abortion that people have a range of views on and with good reason, and I think that it’s sinful for us to ignore those things. And I think it's tremendous arrogance for us to ignore them as well. I can take one more question. [Someone speaking to him from the audience] Well, that's a long question. [Laughter] You know, I think the assumption that were a unified whole and sort of the—I guess are you, are you talking about the Gaia theory and this kind of thing? [Same audience member speaking unintelligibly] That's right. You know, I don't think that there's any question about that. I think what I've been trying to say is that we are destroying the life support systems on the planet and that… You know, sometimes and [for] some reason, that doesn't have an impact on people. And people, you know, it's my experience is that people do not believe that. No matter how convincing the evidence is, it’s very hard for people to imagine that this earth is gonna stop supporting us despite all the evidence and despite the fact that people all around the globe are experiencing, right now, their life support systems having evaporated. And we talk about Bangladesh, about Somalia, about Ethiopia, and a number of other places, but there's kind of an attitude that can’t happen to us. So, what I try to do is to try to make it—some of the issues that I talk about more media and to talk about the economy which is something that enough people seem to understand. But it's funny—it's an odd thing and you pointed out that it’s, you know, with good reason that people will listen to stuff about the economy, but they won't listen to the big issues about the life support systems and our planet. So I try to interweave that a little in what I say but I certainly don't mean to dismiss the peril that we are now in and thanks for bringing it up. Thank you all very much for having me. You’ve been a wonderful audience. And thanks for having me to Tulsa [Applause].