[Congressional Record Volume 150, Number 52 (Wednesday, April 21, 2004)]
[Senate]
[Pages S4181-S4182]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                               EARTH DAY

  Mr. ENZI. I will switch to another topic now. Tomorrow is Earth Day 
and all of us are concerned about the future of the Earth. We are 
concerned about the environment, and we are concerned about the 
activities that happen in that environment. Earlier there was a comment 
about wilderness areas and how wilderness study areas can be violated.
  I need to address this wilderness study issue because Wyoming is the 
only State in the Nation that negotiated its wilderness areas years 
ago. We wanted to get that figured out. We wanted to protect vast 
areas, and we did. There is always the recommendation that there be 
additional wilderness study areas, and we do not have any problem with 
that, with a small caveat, and that is that the wilderness study areas 
are often areas that are being used as part of the economy of our 
State. They are already areas that have had development.
  Do my colleagues know what happens when they go into a wilderness 
study area. They go into an indefinite period of being studied with 
nothing being allowed to happen on that land. The things that were 
already happening cannot continue. It moves back to a primitive state, 
with no activity, for an indefinite period of time.
  There are some wilderness impact study areas that have been looked at 
for 20 years. Do my colleagues not think a decision ought to be able to 
be made in less than 20 years? There might even be some out there that 
are longer than that.
  The fear of people whose economy relies on an area that they have 
already been using is it will be designated a wilderness impact study 
area and they will lose their right to use it for what they have been 
earning their living at, for years, while it is not being studied. That 
is a crime.
  Another problem we have is it is a big country and things tend to be 
one size fits all. For instance, I just saw an ad in the paper asking 
people to send money to help preserve wolves. It was a glorious ad. 
That is what ads are. They are to sell people on doing things. But they 
only tell one side of the story, and I hope before people send their 
money they will check with areas that are being impacted by a wolf 
population. It has a little bit to do with our Endangered Species Act.
  The Endangered Species Act is a Federal policy. It has to be. This is 
a vast country and we try to save things all over--and we need to. But 
it is an unfunded mandate for States, for counties, for towns, and 
particularly for individuals. That is against the law, to put unfunded 
mandates on the States, the counties, and the people, but we do it with 
the Endangered Species Act.
  Right now, Wyoming's wolf program costs about $1.2 million a year. 
That is coming out of the Wyoming pocket; that is not coming out of the 
Federal pocket. There are county expenses involved in it that are not 
being paid for by the Federal Government. There are individuals who can 
no longer use their land, they can't make the living on their land they 
were making because of a Federal policy. Do we pay them anything for 
that? No, we don't. We should. There are definitely laws about

[[Page S4182]]

takings, but the Endangered Species Act has not adjusted to that.
  Just today, in the Wyoming media, there was an article about the 
failure of the Feds to list the Colorado River cutthroat trout. So far 
none of the cutthroat trout has been listed as endangered. We have been 
doing a job in Wyoming of replacing them in traditional streams where 
they have been. In fact, in Saratoga, WY, we killed off a huge brook 
trout population and replaced it with cutthroat trout which were the 
native trout of that area. The people were a little disturbed to find 
out that the Colorado cutthroat doesn't grow as big as the brook trout 
which they were used to fishing. The whole stream was poisoned out and 
these other fish were put in, and they were prohibited from using any 
fish in this river for a number of years. Most of the people I know do 
catch-and-release fishing, but there can be fish killed doing that. 
Under the Endangered Species Act, that would result in Federal action 
against the fisherman.
  I am hoping the fishermen of the country are paying attention, as 
they are talking about listing some of these endangered species. The 
fishermen of this country have been doing a marvelous job of making 
sure species are preserved.
  I will tell you an interesting little story. There is a fish hatchery 
near Saratoga. It doesn't have brook trout or Colorado cutthroat trout 
in it; it has lake trout in it. How did they come to get in the lake 
trout business in Wyoming? A number of years ago, some lake trout were 
caught out of the Great Lakes. They were transported by rail to 
Montana. They were backpacked into Yellowstone and planted in a lake 
there and they grew well. Eventually the lake trout in the Great Lakes 
had a problem. They died off. Where did they go to replace them? We 
built a hatchery in southern Wyoming. We caught lake trout out of 
Yellowstone Park, put them in this hatchery, raised them to maturity 
and got eggs, grew some of those, took some back in the form of eggs 
and planted them in the Great Lakes. So the loop of preservation was 
provided by the State of Wyoming.
  That is the way species have to be provided for, not by prohibiting 
and stopping, through regulation, people from being able to use what 
they have traditionally used. The fishermen are some of the people who 
are working to overcome this.
  There is a little animal called the black-footed ferret. It was 
extinct. You would think that was supposed to mean there weren't any 
around. They found some in Wyoming. A little while after they 
discovered this animal still existed, they found out that a number of 
them were being wiped out by a plague. The State of Wyoming went in and 
trapped all of the rest of the black-footed ferret, and the State of 
Wyoming built a special facility to raise them and try to get as much 
cross development as possible. Today the black-footed ferret has been 
planted back in rural areas of the western United States. It has made a 
huge difference. But that was all done at Wyoming expense; that was not 
done at Federal expense. Something needs to be done about the 
Endangered Species Act.

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