CONGRESSIONAL RECORD -- SENATE
March 11, 1968
Page 5975
PRESIDENT JOHNSON REAFFIRMS AMERICA'S COMMITMENT TO SOUND CONSERVATION POLICIES
Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, the President of the United States, in his environmental improvement message last Friday, reaffirmed our Nation's high esteem for the natural values of the environment. The preservation of nature's beauty and order for recreational and esthetic enjoyment is in the best tradition of our stewardship of this land. More recently, we have come to recognize the great value of scientific observations and engineering to help correct inadvertent abuses of our natural heritage. And we now have available new opportunities to protect the land, air and water for many previously incompatible uses.
These problems and opportunities do not stop at the seacoast. We have learned that untampered wetlands or coastal lands and waters, for example, are in many cases highly productive -- yielding substantial quantities of shellfish, with commercial values exceeding that of our most fertile farmland. Conservation means not only an end to waste resources, but the reclamation of natural wealth. And our responsibility to our children's children provides a moral dimension to these efforts.
Two years ago the Congress took the initiative to enunciate a policy to utilize more effectively the seas around us -- including inshore waters over the Continental Shelf, the ocean deeps, and the inland seas formed by the Great Lakes. Enactment of Public Law 89-454 was an expression of the conservationist philosophy at its best. It looks to preservation of marine resources for constructive use by mankind.
I am pleased that the President's message underlines the promise of the sea, the inshore waters and its resources, and the determination by the Federal Government to intensify its efforts to study and to utilize the sea. This is particularly significant for the State of Maine.
The President spoke highly in the message of the National Sea Grant College and Program Act as a "new partnership between the Federal Government and the Nation's universities which will prepare men and women for careers in the Marine Sciences." Skilled talented manpower is essential to progress in our future study and use of the sea. The President's recommendation of $6 million for the sea grant program for fiscal year 1969 is a modest program for continuation of new university activities being begun in fiscal year 1969. This investment supports our institutions of higher education, opens fresh opportunities to our young people, and plants the seeds for realizing the great potential benefits from the sea. We should be doing far more than this, if the demands of our military commitments were not so overriding.
I congratulate the President on his vision and his initiative. The deep ocean is the final geographic frontier for exploration on our planet. He sounds a challenging and exciting call when he announces our intent to seek with other nations to launch an international decade of ocean exploration for the 1970's. He rightly characterizes this as a "historic and unprecedented adventure." The long-range benefits from tapping the ocean's resources -- in magnitudes not now known -- are reason enough for a partnership among all the nations bordering the oceans to initiate their exploration. But the opportunity offered by a decade of ocean exploration is not limited to national advantages. It is above all a spiritual challenge to modern man to explore fully his environment. The self-discipline to master the environment without despoiling it; to preserve and even occasionally to enhance nature for her joint occupancy -- that is the moral imperative before us.