SteamDoc@aol.com wrote:
> What has people scared is that Norton's first job out of law school was
> working for James Watt at his Mountain States Legal Foundation (see
> www.mountainstateslegal.org), which fought for the rights of corporate
> America to pillage the environment in the West. Watt became Reagan's
> Secretary of the Interior, was highly controversial and confrontational, and
> was eventually canned. Watt was influenced by a belief that the Second
> Coming was near, and he dismissed the idea of stewardship for future
> generations, saying that Jesus would return before the future generations
> arrived.
This statement often attributed to Watt is really more extreme than
anything that he can be
(to my knowledge) documented as saying. In _The New Yorker_ of 4 May 1981
(p.111), Elizabeth Drew quoted him as follows:
"We don't know when He [Jesus] is coming, so we have a stewardship
responsibility ... to see that people are provided for until He does come and a
new order is put in place"
and
"we cannot despoil that which we've been given in the earth because we
don't know our tenure here."
(It's been about 10 years since I copied this & I don't know now what the
ellipsis in the first quote represents. I'm sure that it wasn't an attempt on my
part to whitewash Watt.)
Shalom,
George
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Jan 03 2001 - 14:31:18 EST