With this rhetorical flourish, a Republican president lent the voice of his office to the growing national chorus of the new environmental consciousness. His reference to a “birthright” suggested that the responsibilities of the present generation for the environmental well-being of future ones bore the stamp of natural law itself (cf., Borrelli, 1986). Given the climate of the times, this did not sound like hyperbole. The cause of environmental protection had come to articulate itself in terms of moral rights, for example by linking the principle of equality of opportunity to the right to a decent environment, without which opportunity is compromised (Schroeder, 1983: 16–17; also Bardach and Kagan, 1982: 13–14):