The environment is the most important, the most fundamental, civil-rights issue.... Four out of every five toxic-waste dumps in America is in a black neighborhood.

The law in the United States, in every jurisdiction until about 1876, was that if a factory put smoke into the air, even one day a year, and it got onto a neighbor's property, the neighbor had the right to enjoin to close down the factory, and the courts had no choice but to do that.

The journalists in America are no longer covering critical stories. Investigative journalism is gone. Foreign-news coverage is gone. The press is owned by five giant corporations.

I don't even consider myself an environmentalist anymore. I'm a free-marketer. I go out into the marketplace and I catch the polluters who are cheating the free market.

GE is the biggest polluter of the Hudson.. years ago they killed all the fish dumping millions of lbs. of pcb's into our waterways. Now let's make them pay for the cleanup.

Investigative journalism has been relegated to a very, very tiny space in America. We don't really have much investigative journalism left. And the last refuge for it is documentary filmmaking.

Now we are all learning what it's like to reap the whirlwind of fossil fuel dependence... Our destructive addiction has given us a catastrophic war in the Middle East and - now - Katrina is giving our nation a glimpse of the climate chaos we are bequeathing our children.