There is no domestic issue more important to America in the long run than the conservation and proper use of our natural resources, including fresh water, clean air, tillable soil, forests, wilderness, habitat for wildlife, minerals and recreational assets.

...Your company...will send drugs to all the underdeveloped countries of the world, and since they do not have any standards, we will fool them all and can make a great big profit and never tell the doctors that there is a risk.....You will meet the standards of the country in which you are advertising, not the...proper standard...I would think that you would not sleep at night....I do not think this country will not stand for it.

Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.

The wealth of the nation is its air, water, soil, forests, minerals, rivers, lakes, oceans, scenic beauty, wildlife habitats and biodiversity... that's all there is. That's the whole economy. That's where all the economic activity and jobs come from. These biological systems are the sustaining wealth of the world.

We're going to have to do a whole lot more, and give nature at least a chance to repair some of the damage we've done.

All nations are degrading and consuming their environment to a point beyond capacity. In the past 15 years in the U.S. we have added 1300 cities with populations over 100,000. When the environment is forced to file Chapter 11, the ecology collapses. Nations recover from war but not from a failed eco-system. The status of our environment is more threatening than all wars. It is forever.

The issues are by some geometric number - 100 or 200 or 500 - times more complicated today than we appreciated them to be when Franklin Roosevelt was around.