My father being an outdoors person, he used to take us on quite a few adventures thorugh the wild areas down there, introducing us to alligators and rattlesnakes and all the trees and plants.
The biggest challenge is how to affect public attitudes and make people care.
Then a neighbor, Mr Smith, had a dairy cow and an couple bulls. He showed me how to bluff a bull.
We used to play baseball back in that field and keep an eye out for the bulls.
I don't want to save a creek for the creek's sake, but what's in it for human beings.
I remember very much there in Falls Church there was a creek that was flowing down into 4 Mile Run. I believe it's now covered up where it goes under Columbia Street. I found a whole family of weasels down there.
Preserving a river or a creek can bring a lot of revenue.
There's no country in the world that's more devastated from natural resources than Afghanistan.
According to Johnny Carson, I was the guy who Marlon sent out to do all the dirty work.
But I'll tell you what, there was a lot of farmland between Falls Church and Washington.
My father was a soil scientist with the Geological Survey.
I have a lot of memories of Falls Church. I went to grade school in Madison Elementary School.
Everybody has a camcorder now, and they exploit these incidents and blow them all out of proportion.
Johnny Carson started the jokes about me and Marlin in his monologues.
Almost all these hotspots around the world, most have been destroyed to the point where there is no wildlife and very little of the natural world left.
Sooner or later we've got to tie the saving of the natural world to our own public welfare.
The most powerful argument of all for saving open space is economics; in most states, tourism is the number two industry.
The quicker we humans learn that saving open space and wildlife is critical to our welfare and quality of life, maybe we'll start thinking of doing something about it.
I always said it was to be dumb enough to do what Marlon Perkins said to do.
The other thing is quality of life; if you have a place where you can go and have a picnic with your family, it doesn't matter if it's a recession or not, you can include that in your quality of life.
