United States Department of the Interior

“ If flexible coordinative planning's advantages for a place like the Potomac Basin are recognized, and it is accepted as the most reasonable and hopeful way to approach problems there, the question arises as to what kind of agency is best suited to carry it forward and to act on it. Besides certain unique agencies like the Tennessee Valley Authority several types of institutions are available that can be oriented toward a whole interstate river basin. ”

“ The Department of the Interior, with a central interest in the problem, is taking the lead in an attempt to arrive at a better flow-augmentation policy that will permit right choices, put costs where they belong, and make certain that at the local level where pollution takes place there is sharp incentive to do something about it. ”

“ Certain of the State and Federal programs mentioned above are being applied mainly through such bodies. But it seems to be an unavoidable conclusion that if local government continues to be the weakest link in the chain of planning, preservation of the environment is going to require not only stouter incentives to elicit cooperation from communities, but also more authority at higher levels of government to guard against at least the worst types of landscape abuse. ”

“ We believe that an interstate-federal agency for the planning, development and management of the Potomac, envisaged by the Compact, offers by far the most promising opportunity for the people of the Basin to guide the water resources development of the Potomac, and for the implementation of many of the Report's recommendations. ”

“ Obvious connections exist between good local environments and such things as planning aid programs and grants for parks and recreation areas, but other grant programs, public works, road and utility routings, tax and mortgage practices, the proper or improper design of government facilities, and many other Federal or State activities have relevance in this respect. ”

“ As the Nation’s principal conservation agency, the Department of the Interior has basic responsibilities for water, fish, wildlife, mineral, land, park and recreational resources. Indian and territorial affairs are other major concerns of America’s “Department of Natural Resources.” The Department works to assure the wisest choice in managing all our resources so each will make its full contribution to a better United States—now and in the future. ”

“ I urge that all our National parks adjacent to National forests be placed completely under the control of the forest service of the Agricultural Department, instead of leaving them as they now are, under the Interior Department and policed by the army. ”

“ An organization based [Pg 100a] in such cooperation could cut through much of the Basin's tangle of jurisdictions involved and to each of them individually, and would be responsible to each and all. It could mesh the efforts of the numerous and diverse action agencies sponsored by each jurisdiction and aim them toward overall Basin goals, probably more effectively than any other arrangement could. ”

“ Politically, this sense of collective identity gets official expression in the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, a regional body which, like its counterparts in other urban conglomerations throughout the country, is geared to work directly with the Federal Government in dealing with its own regional problems rather than having to come at Federal programs and agencies along the more lengthy traditional route through the States. ”

“ It is the part-time home of many influential lawmakers, who concern themselves about its beauty and well-being. And together with the national capital at the core of its metropolis, it is the vacation goal of millions of American tourists from elsewhere each year, who go home aware not only of monuments and marble halls of state but of crucial Civil War battlefields, dark mountain ridges overlooking classic river valleys, rolling Piedmont estates, and the wooded headlands of Virginia and Maryland that recede behind one another into haze as one looks down the estuary in summertime. ”

“ How much of the rising tide of public concern over American rivers and lakes, for instance, comes from an awareness of what dirtied water costs the economy, and how much is rooted in simple disgust over a monstrous ugliness that should not be? Gullied and abandoned land grown up to scrub and weeds is not only useless as it stands but also a sadness on the landscape, a reminder of how far from the naive, often sentimental, but lastingly powerful 18th century ideal of oneness with nature men have wandered in their progress. ”

“ It is the policy of the executive branch to empower State and local law enforcement agencies across the country to perform the functions of an immigration officer in the interior of the United States to the maximum extent permitted by law. ”

“ The measure of praise you have been kind enough to award to me for my administration of the Interior Department is—I say this without any affectation of modesty—perhaps too generous. I know better than any body else that my administration has not been perfect. The Interior Department is not only the most difficult, it is also the most dangerous, department of the Government. ”

“ These are the history-minded people, the wilderness folk, the nature traditionalists, and the others whose main concern is that man and the pleasant world around him have lost all semblance of a balanced relationship with each other, and whose view of the sturdy plunderlust of our ancestors is that our inheritance of it, combined with the technology of bulldozers, is aiming us straight toward a world in which our own structures and destructions may be all there is to see, our own fumes and sewage all there is to smell, our own voices and machines all there is to hear. ”

“ The miles on miles of varied, carefully managed fields and pastures, with fat herds and handsome old stone houses and barns, nearly always against a backdrop of dark mountains and with a pleasant river or creek running at hand, among trees, have a potent storybook appeal that sticks in the memory of anyone who ever saw them. ”

“ As time goes in the United States, the Potomac Basin has been populated by our restless people for a long while, and very little of it has not been affected as a result—the deep exhaustion of the Tidewater when the tobacco bonanza ran out, the lumbering off of the mountains, the grubby continuing reign of coal along the North Branch, and now the explosive growth of the Washington metropolis and the other centers of industry and people. ”

“ It seems certain that political "muscle" and respectability for the legitimate conservationist viewpoint is shaping up fast enough that it will be able to dissipate the worst threats—the grabbing and the spoiling, the ignorance and the archaic attitudes, the onward shove of brute technology for technology's own sake rather than for man's—before they have forced mankind on into the gray sterility of life that would be their ultimate effect. ”

“ This part of the Sequoia belt seemed to me the finest, and I then named it 'The Giant Forest.' It extends, a magnificent growth of giants grouped in pure temple groves, ranged in colonnades along the sides of meadows or scattered among the other trees, from the granite headlands overlooking the hot foothills and plains of the San Joaquin back to within a few miles of the old glacier fountains at an elevation of 5,000 to 8,400 feet above the sea."
Giant Forest is also the name of the village beneath the sequoias where the Giant Forest Lodge and the housekeeping and auto camps are situated. ”

“ When conditions are right—when sun, summer temperatures, low inflows from the river above, and a heavy concentration of nitrate and phosphate nutrients all combine to make of the upper estuary one vast inspired pool of fertility—the whole surface of the river may be covered with a thick bright emerald mat, and boats that pass at speed leave wakes of green instead of white. ”

“ In the hands of a few emerging experts, planning which pays attention to soils and topography and climate and special landscape features and values can be a subtle art, prescribing villages and farms and factories in the right places, making the most of native vegetation and views and places where George Washington slept and the breezes of July. ”

“ The Chair of the Task Force shall be the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. Each of the Federal departments and agencies, as appropriate, shall designate one staff person, for the years 2004 through 2006, to work on issues of the Task Force and to ensure the participation of the staff person's department or agency in the operations of the Task Force. ”

“ It is an unhappy fact that there is often less than no point in presenting even fine proposals for legislative consideration at a financially inappropriate point in history. Once defeated, whatever the reason, they may forever languish in limbo. ”

“ There was an editorial today in The New York Times that, I think, pointed out that the Interior Department too often has been seen as an appendage of commercial interests as opposed to a place where the values and interests of the American people are served. ”

“ To defer irreversible decisions and to leave them as much as possible to future generations whose conditions of life and desires we cannot predict with accuracy, can be a principal way of maintaining freedom of choice. ”

“ What was once, when someone was fifteen, a secret clearing in the woods beyond a city's edge, may hold a hamburger stand or several dozen stacked car bodies when he comes back to seek it out at the age of twenty. ”

“ Members of the House and Senate reached a crucial agreement to create a new department of homeland security. With Congress' vote on the final legislation, America will have a single agency with the full-time duty of protecting our people against attack. ”

“ This is an insistently momentous time, with boom, frenetic pleasure, sophisticated communications, space exploration, racial crisis, young rebellion, and all the other contemporary phenomena demanding attention and stirring up a dust that makes clear vision hard. ”

“ And this frustration, plus the pattern of exodus for some and sour jammed imprisonment for the rest, has within the past few years been killing off one by one all the special satisfactions and delights that cities from time immemorial have furnished their inhabitants. ”