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was the merger of state of corporate power.
And we what we have to understand as Americans is that the domination of business by government is called Communism.
The domination of government by business is called Fascism.
And what our job is is to walk that narrow trail in between which is free market capitalism and democracy. And keep big government at bay with our right hand and corporate power at bay with our left.
In order to do that we need an informed public and an activist public.
And we need a vigorous and an independent press that is willing to speak truth to power. And we no longer have that in the United States of America. And that's something that we all, puts us all, all the values we care about in jeopardy because you cannot have a clean environment if you do not have a functioning democracy. They are intertwined, they go together.
There is a direct correlation around the planet between the level of tyranny and the level of environmental destruction. I could talk about that all day but you cannot--the only way you can protect the environment is through a true, locally based democracy.
You can protect it for a short term under a tyranny where there is some kind of beneficent dictator but over the long term the only way we can protect the environment is by ensuring our democracy. That has got to be the number one issue for all of us; to try to restore American democracy because without that we lose all of the other things that we value.
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.
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