Kuralt On The Environmental Offense Ex-Cbs Newsman Criticizes Conservatives For Urging Weakening Of Land Laws

Former CBS newsman Charles Kuralt, who explored the nation for 20 years in his program “On the Road,” is taking Rush Limbaugh and other conservatives to task for urging weakening of U.S. environmental laws.

Kuralt moved to the other side of the microphone recently to advocate continued protection of rivers, forests and other natural resources he says he came to love during his long-running show.

“Many people younger than I, maybe including Rush Limbaugh and those who refer to environmentalists as “wackos,’ do not remember the state of our land and air and water just a few short years ago,” Kuralt said during a recent appearance at the National Press Club with the river protection group, American Rivers.

“It is well within my memory when none of us had ever thought of the Earth as a spaceship with a limited supply of fuel and food and water and a constantly growing passenger list - a concept familiar to every third-grader in America today, thank heavens,” he said.

Limbaugh replied with uncharacteristic restraint.

“I have too much respect for the distinguished career of Mr. Kuralt to embarrass him by responding,” he said in a statement released Wednesday through an aide in New York City.

Limbaugh criticized “environmental wackos” on his nationally syndicated radio talk show earlier this year.

“The second violent American revolution is just about - I got my fingers about a quarter of an inch apart - is just about that far away. Because these people are sick and tired of a bunch of bureaucrats in Washington driving into town and telling them what they can and can’t do with their land,” he said.

Kuralt said Limbaugh and others would do well to ask their elders about what happened to natural resources before Congress started writing a series of environmental laws during the 1960s and 1970s.

“I cannot believe the talk-show hosts, or for that matter the members of Congress, would make as a priority turning back some of the most successful programs we’ve ever had, the ones that started in the sixties and proceeded through mostly Republican administrations, to give us the promise that we have today,” said Kuralt, whose program debuted in 1967 and ran through the late 1980s.

“They must never have seen raw sewage flowing out of a 15-inch pipe into the Hudson River in one of its most beautiful parts as I have seen. They must never have seen hundreds of square miles of algae from fertilizer, agricultural runoff, spoiling the glory of Florida Bay stretching down the Keys.

“If they had seen these things it would not be possible to speak of environmental wackos. And it would not be possible to weaken some of the most successful and bipartisan legislation we have seen as a country the last 25 years,” he said.

Kuralt, 60, who joined American Rivers’ board of directors after retiring from CBS a year ago, singled out Limbaugh at a news conference announcing the group’s list of the “10 Most Endangered Rivers” in North America.

“I became interested in rivers after all these years wandering around the country,” he said in an interview.

Kuralt has taken special interest in a gold mine planned near the Clark’s Fork of the Yellowstone River near Yellowstone National Park in Montana. He says the mine would damage the waterway, which American Rivers considers the nation’s “most endangered river.”