Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation conceived in Liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Since the day he came into office President Bush has worked to gut more than 34 years of hard work by weakening many of our Nation's standing environmental laws some of which were signed into law by his father.

Loads of chemicals and hazardous wastes have been introduced into the atmosphere that didn't even exist in 1948. The environmental condition of the planet is far worse than it was 42 years ago.

Of the 55 refineries closed in America in the last 10 years they were all closed for economic reasons mostly oil company mergers. Not a single one was closed for environmental purposes or objections.

Despite Arizona's remarkable growth in recent years we have met the current federal health standards for ozone pollution and the Environmental Protection Agency recently approved our dust control plan.

I reflect back 35 years ago and look how far we have come in America with our environmental policy to improve the conditions of our air and water and we have had some real successes.

The main environmental challenge of the 21st century is poverty. When you don't know where your next meal is coming from it's hard to consider the environment 100 years down the line.

Federal elections happen every two years in this country. Presidential elections every four years. And four years just isn't long enough to dismantle all the environmental laws we've got in this country.

I decided that now is the time to start doing the things that really interest me and I find important. It was in the 10 years of the MacArthur grant that I began working on my first book... and I began putting more work into environmental history.

I don't think it's too hippie to want to clean up the planet so you don't wind up dying of some kind of cancer when you're 45 years old. It enrages me that these big cancer-research organizations can't be bothered to man the front lines of environmental protest.

I'm a latecomer to the environmental issue which for years seemed to me like an excuse for more government regulation. But I can see that in rich societies voters are paying less attention to economic issues and more to issues of the spirit including the environment.

All we can hope for is that the thing is going to slowly and imperceptibly shift. All I can say is that 50 years ago there were no such thing as environmental policies.

Within 10 years it will be impossible to travel to the North Pole by dog team. There will be too much open water.

Liberals in Congress have spent the past three decades pandering to environmental extremists. The policies they have put in place are in large part responsible for the energy crunch we are seeing today. We have not built a refinery in this country for 30 years.

The modern assault on the environment began about 50 years ago during and immediately after World War II.

Population when unchecked goes on doubling itself every 25 years or increases in a geometrical ratio.

I confess that for fifteen years my efforts in education and my hopes of success in establishing a system of national education have always been associated with the idea of coupling the education of this country with the religious communities which exist.

Teachers say their schools of education did not adequately prepare them for the classroom. They would have welcomed more mentoring and feedback in their early years.

In more than 20 years I've spent studying the issue I have yet to hear a convincing argument that college football has anything do with what is presumably the primary purpose of higher education: academics.

I would have been about seven years old when the formative years of my competitive football education began. I was playing in the local leagues around Manchester playing against lads from tough areas who had been taught they had to fight for everything.

I went to drama school for four years at Carnegie Mellon conservatory training before television comedy. I was doing Shakespeare and Chekov plays. It's about delivering on the promise of a $100 000 education and taking the shackles off and trying the hand at my craft. I'm thrilled with what I've seen so far.

I learned a lot from that first record and I learned a lot from my experiences touring but really the biggest education I got over the past two years was learning the importance of arrangements.

I thought if anyone need a leg up it was our foster children. So I started getting involved in education reform and that was back in 1998. And as a result of all the reform work that I had done people urged me to run for the Minnesota state Senate. I did I was there for six years.

Years ago nobody was elected on the economic ticket. It was either the education platform or it was health or it was other issues. It is only recently that economic values have superceded every other human value.