Mr. Bush Has a Dream (Cont.)

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Outside Magazine September 2001

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Mr. Bush Has a Dream (Cont.)


	Say "No" to sloth! Say "Yes" to energy produced by the unemployed.

It is also my dream—not the one featuring J. Lo, or the other one, where I win Poppy's respect by getting a C-plus average at Yale—to see new logging roads crisscrossing our national parks and nature preserves, maybe even your own backyard. Because wherever Big Lumber needs to go, right now, to turn those green forests into greenbacks for the political action committees that have brought our political system to the state it is in today, is as much a part of the American Way as wood. Or there would be no Popsicle sticks or baseball bats. In fact, even as I speak, surveyors from the Army Corps of Engineers are staking out the symbolic logging road to be hacked from one end to the other of New York's Central Park—too long a scandalously underutilized forestry resource.

And that's not all. We need to confront America's energy needs head-on with bold new initiatives, such as harnessing the nation's unemployed for human power to manually turn the wheels of the thousands of electric miniturbines and treadmill generators planned for installation in parks, picnic grounds, campsites, and other useless spaces nationwide, generating billions of kilowatts of free electrical energy to keep our video games, illuminated billboards, and shoe-buffing machines—our very lifeblood—humming. Think of it: The more homeless, unfortunate, and unemployed among us, the more free electrical power!



	Artist's rendering of the soon-to-be-completed logging road through Central Park (with spires of Upper West Side looming in background)

As your President, and, for that matter, mine too, I am told that I am dedicated to solving the problem of our increasingly endangered freshwater supply. Mere half-measures may suffice for civil rights and education, but not for this. We must eliminate America's outdated fetish for fresh, clean water within our lifetime, if not sooner. This would set industry free to turn every river and lake into the toxic brown sludge that says, loud and clear, "Costs way down, profits way up!" And it can be done, once our drinking and all water needs are met by the most plentiful and renewable water source on earth: tangy, sodium-, iodine-, and manganese-rich water from the sea. Try one sip: You'll want more, and more, and more.

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