Friday, June 30, 2006

James Watt Said What?

I was looking into some of the atheism materials over at Kele's Journey, another e-blogger blog, and ran across a supposed quotation of James Watt, a former official in President Ronald Reagan's administration.
According to Kele (no citation was offered), Watt said "We don't have to protect the environment, the Second Coming is at hand."
I could remember Watt being accused of something along those lines, but that quotation looked unfamiliar to me. I did a Google search particular to the phrase and returned plenty of hits minus any helpful context. Restricting to .gov sites turned up no results. Restricting to .edu, suprisingly, shrank the number of hits down to two. Just for good measure, I also checked the hits for Google Scholar. Google Scholar generated one hit, and the citation simply referred back to a Gainesville (FL) humanist site.

Of note, I did find an article by Byron York apparently exposing a similar quotation attributed to James Watt (parroted by Bill Moyers, of all people).

Okay, I've got a well-substantiated quotation that falls vaguely along those lines.

Answers.com confirms that Watt said
"That is the delicate balance the Secretary of the Interior must have: to be steward to the natural resources for this generation as well as future generations. I do not know how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns; whatever it is we need to manage it with a skill to leave the resources needed for future generations."
The same site also confirms the York story to the extent that Watt secured an apology from Bill Moyers over the misquotation issue.
The quotation that Kele is using is suspicious. Given the quotation of Watt here, the presumption probably ought to be that the quotation is inauthentic. In any case, I'll do some follow-up research in order to put the matter to bed. I suspect that the quotation was a paraphrase that got attributed to Watt over time.




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