Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., on the PBS program NOW:

[Polluters] make themselves rich by making everybody else poor. They raise standards of living for themselves by lowering quality of life for everybody else, and they do that by escaping the discipline of the free market.

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Nature enriches us. When we destroy nature we diminish ourselves. We impoverish our children.

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Good environmental policy is identical to good economic policy. Environmental injury is deficit spending. It’s a way of loading the cost of our generation’s prosperity onto the backs of our children.

If we treat the planet as it it were a business in liquidation—convert our national resources to cash as quickly as possible, have a few years of pollution-based prosperity—we can generate an instantaneous cash flow and the illusion of a prosperous economy, but our children are going to pay for our joy ride.