What polluters do is raise the standards of living for themselves, while lowering the quality of living for everybody else, and they do that by escaping the disciplines of the free market.

Like other Americans, I’ve reconciled myself to the idea that an animal’s life has been sacrificed to bring me a meal of pork or chicken. However, industrial meat production – which subjects animals to a life of torture – has escalated the karmic costs beyond reconciliation.

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.

I was interested in the environment from when I was a little kid. I spent most of my time hunting and fishing and kayaking.

Wind has the potential to produce many, many more jobs per kilowatt hour than coal. But the coal industry has tremendous political clout on Capitol Hill because of its alliance with the railroads and coal-burning utilities.

The best measure of how a democracy is functioning is how it allocates the goods of the land, the public trust assets.

I think we as Americans know there’s a much better alternative than the 17th century practice of burning rocks to power our economy.

American democracy is supposed to be the paradigm for the rest of the world.

Of the seven million Americans living abroad, one million are military, and not all of them are Republicans. The other six million are overwhelmingly Democrat because people who live in foreign countries have a much different perspective as to what is happening in our country.

One out of every six American women has so much mercury in her womb that her children are at risk for a grim inventory of diseases, including autism, blindness, mental retardation and heart, liver and kidney disease.