We Must Take America Back

...I’ll say one last thing which is the issue I started off with which is
that we’re not protecting the environment. What Justice Douglas understood.

We’re not protecting the environment for the sake of the fishes and
the birds.

We’re protecting it for our own sake because we recognize that nature
enriches us. It enriches us economically, yes, the base of our economy. And
we ignore that at our peril.

The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment but it
also enriches us esthetically and recreationally and culturally and
historically and spiritually. Human beings have other appetites besides
money and if we don’t feed them we’re not going to grow up. We’re not going
to become the kind of beings our creator intended us to become.

When we destroy nature we diminish ourselves. We impoverish our
children.

We’re not protecting those ancient forests in the Pacific Northwest as
Rush Limbaugh loves to say, for the sake of a spotted owl. We’re preserving
those forests because we believe that the trees have more value to humanity
standing then they would have if we cut them down. I’m not fighting for the
Hudson River for the sake of the shad or the sturgeon or the striped bass,
but because I believe my life will be richer and my children and my
community will be richer if we live in a world where there are shad and
sturgeon and striped bass in the Hudson.

And where my children can see the traditional gear, commercial
fishermen on the Hudson that I have spent 22 years fighting for their
livelihoods, their rights, their culture, and their values. I want my kids
to be able to see them out in their tiny boats using the same fishing
methods that they learned, their great grandparents learned from the
Algonquin Indians who taught them to the original settlers of New
Amsterdam. I want them to be able to see them with their ash poles and gill
nets and be able to touch them when they come to shore to wait out the
tides, to repair their nets. And in doing that connect themselves to 350
years of the New York State history.

And understand that they’re part of something larger than themselves;
they’re part of a continuum. They’re part of a community.

I don’t want my children to grow up in a world where there are no
commercial fishermen on the Hudson, where it’s all Gordon Seafood and
Unilever and 400 ton factory trawlers 100 miles offshore strip mining the
ocean with no interface with humanity.

And where there are no family farmers left in America. Where it’s all
Smithfield and Cargill and Premium Standard farms raising animals in
factories and treating their stock and their neighbors and their workers
with unspeakable cruelty.

And where we’ve lost touch with the seasons and the tides and the
things that connect us to the 10,000 generations of human beings that were
here before there were laptops.

And that connect us ultimately to God.

I don’t believe that nature is God or that we ought to be worshiping
it as God, but I do believe that it’s the way that God communicates to us
more forcefully.

God talks to human beings through many vectors. Through each other,
through organized religions, through wise people and through the great
books of those religions; through art and literature and music and poetry.

But nowhere with such force and clarity and detail and texture and
grace and joy as through creation. We don’t know Michelangelo by reading
his biography; we know him by looking at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

And we know our creator best by immersing ourselves in creation. And
particularly wilderness which is the undiluted work of the creator.

And you know [applause] if you look at every one of the great
religious traditions throughout the history of mankind the central epiphany
always occurs in the wilderness. Buddha had to go to the wilderness to
experience self realization and nirvana. Mohammad had to go to the
wilderness in Mt. Harrod 629, climb to the summit, rest one angel in the
middle of the night to have the Koran squeeze from his body.

Moses had to go to the wilderness of Mt. Sinai for 40 days alone to
get the Commandments. The Jews had to spend 40 years wandering the
wilderness to purge themselves of 400 years of slavery in Egypt.

Christ had to go into the wilderness for 40 days to discover his
divinity for the first time. His mentor was John the Baptist, a man who
lived in the Jordan valley dressed in the skins of wild beasts and ate
locust and the honey of wild bees and all of Christ’s parables are taken
from nature. I am the vine; you are the branches. The mustard seed, the
little swallows, the scattering of seeds on the [Fellowgram], the lilies of
the field. He called himself a fisherman, a farmer, a vineyard keeper, a
shepherd.

The reason he did that was that’s how he stayed in touch with the
people. It’s the same reason all the Talmudic prophets, the Koranic
prophets, the Old Testament prophets, the New Testament prophets. Even the
pagan prophets like Aesop they did the same thing; they used parables and
allegories and fables drawn from nature to teach us the wisdom of God.

And all of the Old Testament prophets, all the Talmudic prophets, all
the New Testament prophets came out of the wilderness. Every one of them
and they were all shepherds. That daily connection to nature gave them a
special access to the wisdom of the all mighty. They used these parables
and the reason Christ did that was that’s how he stayed in touch with the
people. He was saying things that were revolutionary like all the prophets.

He was contradicting everything that the common people had heard from
the literal sophisticated people of their day and they would have dismissed
him as a quack but they were able to confirm the wisdom of his parables
through their own observations of the fishes and the birds.

And they were able to say, he’s not telling us something new; he’s
simply illuminating something very, very old. Messages that were written
into creation at the beginning of time by the creator. We haven’t been able
to discern or decipher them into the prophets came along and immersed
themselves in wilderness and learned its language and then come back into
the cities to tell us about the wisdom of God.

You know, all of our values in this country are the same thing. This
is where our values come from, from wilderness and from nature and from the
beginning of our national history. People from Sierra Club have to
understand this and articulate it.

Our greatest spiritual leaders, moral leaders and philosophers were
telling the American people "You don’t have to be ashamed because you don’t
have the 1,500 years of culture that they have in Europe because you have
this relationship with the land and particularly the wilderness. That’s
going to be the source of your values and virtues and character.

If you look at every valid piece of classic American literature the
central unifying theme is that nature is the critical defining element of
American culture, whether it’s Emerson, Thoreau, Melville and Hawthorne,
Mark Twain, Jack London, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemmingway. All of them.

Let me just finish this thought. The first great writer we produced in
this country, an international best seller, was [James Fenimore Cooper]. He
wrote the The Leather Stocking Tales, The Last of the Mohicans, The
Pathfinder, The Deerslayer, about this character Natie Bumpo who was a
creature of the American wilderness. He had all the virtues that the
European romantics associated with the American woodland; he was a crap
shot, he was self reliant, he had fortitude and integrity and he was a
gentleman and honest.

The reason they made him a bestseller in Europe was not because it was
great writing; it wasn’t. It was atrocious, but because they believed that
there really was a new being being created out of the American forest. We
made him a best seller in our country because we believe that about
ourselves. A generation after that you had Emerson and Thoreau come along
who have kicked off the traces of the European heritage and they embrace
nature as a spiritual parable of all Americans.

They say if you’re an American and you want to hear the voice of God
you have to go into the forest and listen to the songs of the birds and the
rustle of the leaves and if you want to see the American soul you have to
look at the mirror of Walden Pond. Our poets Whitman, Frost, Emily
Dickenson, Robert Service.

Our artists, we have two schools, defining schools of art in this
country: the western school - Remington and Russell - and the Hudson River
School - Bierstadt, Thomas Cole, Frederic Church, Samuel F. B. Morris, etc.
And all of them painted these stark, indomitable portraits. Storm King
Mountain, El Capitan, the Sierra Nevada, Yosemite, the Grand Canyon. Any
evidence of humanity is in ruins.

And there are other national schools of art that painted nature. The
British have their still lives and the French and Italians and their garden
scenes, etc. But that’s nature tamed.

The American artist chose to paint nature in its wildest state because
they saw that as the way to capture the American soul.

As I said this is where our values come from.

These people on Capitol Hill they look out at our green landscapes and
they see nothing but cash for their corporate contributors, quick cash. I
aw a couple of days ago Donald Rumsfeld on TV and I saw him and I saw how
articulate and eloquent he was. I know Donald Rumsfeld, he lives next to my
house in Washington.

When I got out of prison in Puerto Rico a couple of years ago he
actually was very kind to me. I met him at lunch and dinner a couple of
times at my mom’s house. He’s a very charming guy, an affable. If you’re
not in Abu Gharib… but I saw him on TV in his suit and he looked so good
and he’s so eloquent and charming and stuff and I say, here’s a man who’s
had the best of our country. He’s gone to our churches, had the best
schools, the education, the contacts, the money everything. And then I see
these letters that he wrote back and forth with Alberto Gonzales, he’s
emailed debating how much it was permissible for Americans to torture
people. And I say to myself how did these people miss the whole point of
America? How do they not know that torture is not an American family value?

And I say that this is an administration that represents itself as the
White House of values but every value that they claim to represent is just
a hollow façade, that marks the one value that they really consider worth
fighting for which is corporate profit taking.

They say that they like free markets but they despise free market
capitalism. What they like if you look at their feet rather than their
clever, clever mouths what they really like is corporate welfare and
capitalism for the poor but socialism for the rich.

They say that they like private property but they don’t like private
property except when it’s the right of a polluter to use his private
property to destroy his neighbors property and to destroy the public
property.

And they say that they like law and order but they are the first ones
to let the corporate law breakers off the hook. And they say that they like
local control and states rights but they only like those things when it
means sweeping away the barriers to corporate profit taking at the local
level. And you and the Sierra Club know and I can give you hundreds of
examples. They’re suing my cousin Arnold Schwarzenegger. Detroit is suing
him for this - I know that’s not going to get a lot for applause in this
room.

But you know what do you sign into law? The best automobile emissions
bill that was passed by the Democratic legislature and now Detroit is
saying they’re going to sue them just because they recognize that the
emissions here were not protecting the health of the people of their state.
So they want ones that will. Now Detroit is saying it’s going to sue them
and the Federal government is now making noises that it’s going to come
into that suit on the side of Detroit. That’s not local control.

We know and when I’m fighting these hog farms down in North Carolina
and the first people they hear from when these local counties try to pass
the zoning ordinance to zone out the big hog shows. The first person they
heard from is Ted Olson up in the federal government saying that’s an
interference with federal commerce and we’re going to come down on you like
a hammer.

The same thing in West Virginia, when the localities try to zone out
Massey Coal and Peabody from cutting down their mountain the federal
government comes down and crushes them. So they don’t like local control.

And you know all of these things they claim to love.

They claim to love Christianity but they have violated every one of
the manifold mandates of the Christian faith. [applause] that we care for
the environment.

We treat the earth respectfully and we treat our future generations
with respect and all of these things, the values go along with the land we
all know that.

I’ll close with a proverb from the Lakota people that all of you have
heard, that’s been expropriated by the environmental movement to a large
extent where they said we didn’t inherit this planet from our ancestors; we
borrowed it from our children.

I would add to that if we don’t return to our children something that
is roughly the equivalent of what they receive, not just in the quality of
the environment but in the integrity of the values that have been handed
down through generations of Americans.

You know, visionary Republican and Democratic leadership only to hit
these destructive people who are now running our country. The worst
administration that we’ve had in American history and the greatest threat
now to our country and our democracy. And all the values that cherish about
America. And you know the way we’re viewed and the rest of the world we
need to return those things.

I look at this White House and I ask myself - and this may be unfair -
but I ask myself a lot of times, how did they get so many draft dodgers in
one place? You know, the president, Dick Cheney five deferments; John
Ashcroft, six deferments. Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Tom DeLay, all of
their buddies. Dennis Hassert, Rush Limbaugh, well, you know, there are a
lot of people who dodged the draft during the Vietnam War and I know a lot
of them.

Most of them did it because they had moral qualms about that war.

But not these people.

These people love the war; they just wanted somebody else to fight it.
And it occurs to me that the reason for that is that these are people who
don’t understand the values that makes America worth fighting for. But
America is worth fighting for and it’s worth dying for.

Those of us who know that it’s worth fighting for have to take it back
now from those who don’t.

Thank you very much.

===end ===