[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 156 (2010), Part 6]
[House]
[Pages 8535-8536]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




      RECONCILIATION WITH, NOT EXPLOITATION OF, THE NATURAL WORLD

  (Mr. KUCINICH asked and was given permission to address the House for 
1 minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
  Mr. KUCINICH. Mr. Speaker, the Creator gave us a paradise; and we, 
appropriating the power of nature's God, are turning our planet into a 
smoking, glowing, oily mess, through plundering Mother Earth of her 
treasures and through refusing to recognize the growing evidence that 
our reliance on oil, coal, and nuclear threatens our health, our 
security, our economy, our Nation and the world.
  It is not as though there are no alternatives. Markets and industries 
have conspired for years to shelve the massive introduction of wind and 
solar technologies. Thousands of barrels of oil each day billow from 
the ocean floor, covering nearly 20 percent of the gulf, heading 
towards the Florida Keys and the Atlantic coast.
  Must we wait until all coastal areas are ruined, all fish, all birds, 
all animals are injured and killed before we

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realize that drilling presents a threat to the fragile ecology of life?
  We cannot afford to passively witness the destruction of our natural 
environment because written in the oily sands of the gulf is the 
degrading of all life on the planet. Our world exists through fragile 
interconnected systems of life. Our survival depends upon 
reconciliation with, not exploitation of, the natural world.

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