Stewart Lee Udall - "My dear ones, your generation will face a series of environmental challenges that will dwarf anything any previous generation has confronted. I'm hoping to add some insights of my own based on things I learned as a policymaker in the 1950s and '60s, when I observed and participated in some monumental achievements and profound misjudgments. As a freshman congressman in 1955, I regrettably voted with my unanimous colleagues for the Interstate Highway Program. All of us acted on the shortsighted assumption that cheap oil was super-abundant and would always be available."
When Stewart Lee Udall died on March 20th at age 90, we lost a giant of a gentleman and a passionate former public servant. The Arizona native was perhaps the most influential U.S. Secretary of the Interior ever.
Said former Montana Congressman Pat Williams, "his passion and informed leadership persuaded both Presidents and the Congress to designate four new national parks: Canyon Lands in Utah, North Cascades in Washington State, Redwoods in California, and Guadalupe in Texas. He prompted the nation's first National Seashores, eight of them. He asked for and received the designation of six National Monuments and fifty Wildlife Refuges."
And Stewart knew energy. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, he lunched numerous times with geophysicist M. King Hubbert. Shortly after the turn of the century, Stewart and his wife Lee penned this letter to their grandchildren…and yours.]
Stewart Lee Udall Wiki on oil and energy: In October 1972, Udall published a seminal article[6] in The Atlantic Monthly, called "Too many cars, too little oil. An argument for the proposition that 'less is more'" that foresaw problems with US transportation and energy policy and competition with emerging markets for scarce resources.[7] In 1974, Udall, along with Charles Conconi and David Osterhout, wrote "The Energy Balloon", discussing the United States' energy policies.