Nixon's State of the Union Address 1970
Nixon addresses the environmental issues and concerns of the time. Nixon talks about how it is this generations responsibility to clean up and preserve the Earth for the future generations and how we are damaging and destroying our environment. He also says that we have been too tolerant with our surroundings and we need to fix our ways, because we all have a right to a clean environment. He says that clean air, clean water, and open space should be the birth right of every American, so just because resources like air and water are free, it does not mean that we have a right to abuse these resources.
"The great question of the seventies is, shall we surrender to our surroundings, or shall we make our peace with nature and begin to make reparations for the damage we have done to our air, to our land, and to our water?"(TIME, 1970)
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"a decade in which 70 percent of our people lived in metropolitan areas choked by traffic, suffocated by smog, poisoned by water, deafened by noise, and terrorized by crime"(Richard Nixon, 1970)
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"We still think of air as free. But clean air is not free, and neither is clean water. The price tag on pollution control is high. Through our years of past carelessness we incurred a debt to nature, and now that debt is being called."(Richard Nixon, 1970)
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"The automobile is our worst polluter of the air. Adequate control requires further advances in engine design and fuel composition. We shall intensify our research, set increasingly strict standards, and strengthen enforcement procedures-and we shall do it now"(Richard Nixon, 1970)
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"We have been too tolerant of our surroundings and too willing to leave it to others to clean up our environment. It is time for those who make massive demands on society to make some minimal demands on themselves."(Richard Nixon, 1970)
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"Restoring nature to its natural state is a cause beyond party and beyond factions. It has become a common cause of all the people of this country. It is a cause of particular concern to young Americans, because they more than we will reap the grim consequences of our failure to act on programs which are needed now if we are to prevent disaster later."(Richard Nixon, 1970)
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