16 DH EAU DUB ONS BU Ee iN 
to Teddy Roosevelt who wanted 
to be a naturalist, to the greatest 
of all — Thomas Jefferson. 
“In 1790, Tom Jefferson was 
busy at his Secretary of State 
duties in Philadelphia. He writes 
his daughter Mary down in Mon- 
ticello on June 8, noting that the 
first strawberries, and the first 
whippoorwill have just appeared 
in Philadelphia. When did they 
show up at Monticello? Mary re- 
plied that she had seen them 
around in early April. 
“Jefferson was very long on the 
American Mockingbird. The Eu- 
ropeans tried to pass off their 
nightingale as the greatest, but 
Jefferson wrote home ‘Our mock- 
ingbird has the advantage of sing- 
ing through a great part of the 
year, whereas’ the nightingale 
sings but five or six weeks in the 
spring.’ 
“I can tell you that there is 
God’s plenty for a politician — 
conservationist to do in Washing- 
ton. Luckily, I’ve been able to put 
together something called the 
House Subcommittee on Conserva- 
tion, and to be blessed with a 
singularly effective bipartisan 
group of members. All of our doz- 
ens of reports have been unani- 
mous. And we have not pulled 
our punches. 
“For a classic case-study, you 
may have heard about the affair 
at Hunting Creek, five miles down 
the Potomac from Washington. 
This part of the Potomac has al- 
ways been a great refuge for 
diving ducks — canvasbacks and 
redheads, greater scaup and lesser 
scaup, ruddy ducks and _ buffle- 
heads and goldeyes. 
“Well, a land speculator a couple 
of years ago thought it would be 
a great idea to fill in the Hunting 
Creek waterfowl estuary, and then 
build high-rise apartments on the 
fill. For next to nothing, he would 
be getting land worth millions. 
The Corps of Engineers obligingly 
issued him a land-fill permit. The 
Department of Interior — after 
silencing some devoted career 
biologists who were objecting to 
the giveaway — went along. 
“Then the subcommittee got 
wind of it. Congressman John 
Saylor and I pressed our claim 
that the Corps of Engineers’ action 
was unconscionable, and that the 
permit ought to be revoked. It took 
us two years, but finally the Corps 
of Engineers saw the light, or per- 
haps felt the heat. Anyway, the 
Corps backed down, denied the 
permit, the Potomac was saved for 
the moment — and the speculator 
exited snarling. 
“It was the Conservation Sub- 
committee, too, which did that 
remarkable feat of statutory arch- 
eology known as the rediscovery 
of the Refuse Act of 1899. Here we 
were, a year ago, with industrial 
polluters pretty much enabled to 
pour their refuse, their mercury, 
and their toxins into our streams 
and lakes without let nor hind- 
rance. Then we discovered that 
way back in 1899, Congress had 
passed something called the Refuse 
Act. That act said in the simplest 
and most uncomplicated language 
that any industrial polluter who 
discharges any refuse into any 
stream or waterway shall be guilty 
of a crime, and the person giving 
information of such pollution to 
the federal attorney shall be en- 
titled to one-half the fine. 
“We prepared a ‘handy kit’ tell- 
ing each citizen how he could do 
his bit to combat water pollution 
under the Refuse Act of 1899. So 
far, we have distributed something 
like 12,000 of the ‘handy kits.’ And 
the Department of Justice, after 
running through its repertory of 
excuses for not doing anything, 
has finally begun to prosecute 
some of the more flagrant indus- 
trial violators. 
