Richard Nixon Environmentalist

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Pages: 9

Richard Nixon: The Environmentalist
Our knowledge on the environment becomes ever more evident each day. With each passing day, more people join the environmental movement. The environmental movement is one that aims to enhance and preserve the natural world around us. Environmental awareness has become increasingly more popular than ever before. In the United States, many citizens began to think more about how their actions impact the world around them. In 1962 Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, a novel about how strong pesticides were considerably hurting the environment. Her work tugged at the hearts of the people who read it and changed the public views on the environment. Many people have noted that the widening popularity of her work
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When Richard M. Nixon delivered his state of the union address, he became the first United States president to ever mention the environment in this speech. He said, “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?”. In his speech, he also proposed a $10 billion nationwide clean water program and insisted that congress would place modernized municipal waste treatment plants almost everywhere in America within 5 years. He responded to an idea held by many American’s; the damage to our land might have to potentially be the price we need to pay in order to achieve economic growth. He recognized that preventing all damage to our land isn’t possible if our goal is to advancement and growth. However, Nixon did believe that with any economic growth, our ability to find and discover ways to protect our environment will grow as well. These ideas and beliefs had never previously been included in any former presidents state of the union addresses. Nixon was now was the first president to ever include these ideas. Being the president and holding such a high position of respect and power, his support of finding ways to protect and improve the environment proved how large the environmental movement was. Those who hadn’t been familiar with it before knew about it now. President Richard Nixon being a supporting environmental change meant improvement was really