Environmental Protection
Morris K. Udall was fundamentally commited to the passage of environmental laws throughout his thirty years in Congress.
In collaboration with his brother, Secretary of the Interior Stewart L. Udall, they collectively secured the passage of numerous bills concerning environmental legislation during the 1960s. He would continue working in this capacity throughout the 1970s and the 1980s.
In 1972, Mo began efforts to secure lands in Alaska for national parks, refuges, and national forests. The resulting 1979 Alaska Lands Conservation Act would become one of his greatest accomplishments.
Mo also worked hard to shelter vast amounts of land in throughout the western United States. The Arizona Wilderness Act secured over one million acres for preservation and Arizona Desert Wilderness Act another two million.
Legislation pursued by Mo Udall demanded environmental responsibility, creating regulations and safeguards for strip mining, nuclear power, radioactive waste disposal, atomic energy, and logging. In particular, his ability to work with the Reagan administration--known for its drawbacks on environmental policy, social services, civil rights issues, the AIDS pandemic, and for harmful interventionist foreign policy in Central America particularly opposed by Mo--resulted in the landmark 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act establishing a comprehensive national program for the safe and permanent disposal of radioactive waste. No legislation existed in the U.S. on a federal level until then, a good 40 years after the start of U.S. nuclear energy production.