The best measure of how a democracy is functioning is how it allocates the goods of the land, the public trust assets.
We protect nature not for nature’s sake but for our own sake because it’s the infrastructure of our communities...
It is more important to be of service than successful.
American democracy is supposed to be the paradigm for the rest of the world, and it no longer is. Citizens cannot be guaranteed that they can walk into a voting booth with any assurance that their vote will be counted.
We are living in a science-fiction nightmare where children are gasping for breath on bad-air days because somebody gave money to a politician. And my children and the kids of millions of other Americans can no longer go fishing and eat their catch because somebody gave money to a politician.
We need election reform because our elections are being stolen. And these huge powerful voting machine vending companies have privatized the election process in our country.
There is nothing wrong with corporations. Corporations are a good thing. But corporations should not be running our government. Corporations are good because they drive our economy, they encourage people to assemble wealth and to risk it and then create jobs.
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.
These are facts that would make every American upset. Our birthright is being stolen, the legacy of our country is at stake, and the values of our nation are in peril. The future whispers, and the present shouts.
You show me a polluter, I’ll show you a subsidy. I’ll show you a fat cat using political clout to escape the discipline of the free market and force the public to pay his production costs.
I think we as Americans know there’s a much better alternative than the 17th century practice of burning rocks to power our economy.
The way you get democracy to function is by informing the public.
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.
Everyone knows that we’re doing a science experiment with Earth. And the No. 1, No. 2, No. 3, No. 4 contributors to it are the mining and burning of coal.
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.
American democracy is supposed to be the paradigm for the rest of the world.
We do not have free market capitalism in America; we have crony capitalism. There is a huge difference between free market capitalism that democratizes a country and makes us more efficient and prosperous and corporate crony capitalism.
In a true free market economy, you can’t make yourself rich without enriching your community.
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.
I was interested in the environment from when I was a little kid. I spent most of my time hunting and fishing and kayaking.
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.