[Congressional Record Volume 150, Number 120 (Wednesday, September 29, 2004)]
[Senate]
[Pages S9927-S9930]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                 40TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE WILDERNESS ACT

  Mr. McCAIN. Mr. President, throughout our country's history there 
have been many debates in the Congress over the use, conservation, and 
protection of our natural resources. These debates have resulted in 
landmark policies, such as the Louisiana Purchase, the Homestead Act, 
and the establishment of the world's first national park, Yellowstone, 
in 1872.
  Natural resource and environmental issues are inherently complex and 
often controversial, for they involve tradeoffs in which many diverse 
interests have a stake. There is one interest that cannot speak for 
itself and relies upon the vision of others; the interest of future 
generations. Teddy Roosevelt said it best, it seems to me, in his 1916 
book, A Book-Lover's Holidays in the Open, where he castigates those 
``short-sighted men who in their greed and selfishness will, if 
permitted, rob our country of half its charm by their reckless 
extermination of all useful and beautiful wild things''. He goes on to 
say, ``Our duty to the whole, including the unborn generations, bids us 
restrain an unprincipled present-day minority from wasting the heritage 
of these unborn generations. The movement for the conservation of wild 
life and the larger movement for the conservation of all our natural 
resources are essentially democratic in spirit, purpose, and method.''
  It is in this spirit of our moral obligation to the future--to those 
who, in Teddy Roosevelt's memorable phrase, are ``within the womb of 
time''--that I wish to salute the 40th anniversary of the Wilderness 
Act of 1964. I am pleased to lend my support to this bipartisan 
resolution honoring the milestone legislation preserving our Nation's 
rare and spectacular wild places.
  Arizona has the good fortune to have numerous preserved wilderness 
areas, thanks to this law. In fact, more than 4,500,000 acres have been 
preserved in 90 wilderness areas. These range from the Cabeza Prieta 
Wilderness of more than 800,000 acres, to the 2,040 acre Baboquivari 
Peak Wilderness, an extraordinary area designated in 1990. From our 
desert expanses to the heights of 12,643-foot Humphrey's Peak, the 
highest point in Arizona, protected within the Kachina Peaks 
Wilderness, Arizona is not only one of America's fastest-growing 
states, but also a state in which we preserve and treasure our 
wilderness heritage.
  In 1936, the great forester and wilderness champion, Bob Marshall, 
spoke of the luxury--a privilege--we Americans have. He commented that 
Americans can enjoy ``a twofold civilization--the mechanized, 
comfortable, easy civilization of twentieth-century modernity, and the 
peaceful timelessness of the wilderness where vast forests germinate 
and flourish and die and rot and grow again without any relationship to 
the ambitions and interferences of man.''

[[Page S9928]]

  In spite of the environmental challenges that face our country and 
the world today, I am very grateful for the vision of past leaders that 
enacted this law to ensure that those who inhabit our nation many 
generations into the future will be able to experience wilderness in 
their lives, as we do today. As we celebrate the protection of existing 
and additional wilderness areas under this historic law, we follow our 
most noble and nonpartisan traditions of national resource 
conservation.
  Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record 
the following statement of Stewart Udall, one of our Nation's 
conservation leaders and the Secretary of the Interior in the Kennedy 
and Johnson administrations, presented at an event on September 19, 
2004, commemorating the 40th anniversary of the Wilderness Act.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

  Remarks by Former Interior Secretary Stewart Udall--Wilderness Act 
        Commemorative Dinner, Washington, DC, September 19, 2004

       I am honored and delighted to be here tonight with John 
     Dingell and Gaylord Nelson and Bob Byrd. I was running for 
     Congress 50 years ago right now, and I came in the door with 
     John Dingell and Bob Byrd had been there two years, and they 
     considered him a ``hick,''--he played the fiddle, he loved 
     the folk music of his people and now he is the conscience of 
     the Senate.
       If you want to know why I say that, you will buy his book, 
     ``Losing America,'' and find out what his message is. John 
     Dingell, you were given too little credit tonight. The 
     National Environmental Policy Act would probably not have 
     been passed if it had not been for John Dingell. What you 
     don't know is Wayne Aspinell thought it was a crazy idea, and 
     John Dingell said ``if he doesn't want it, then I will pick 
     it up.'' And he carried the mail through the House. So I want 
     to say something--I'm on a ``lecture tour'' this evening. 
     There was something about that time, and John Dingell and I 
     discussed it--the 60s into the 70s was called a golden age of 
     sorts. One of the things that comes to my mind as I go back 
     there is the way you saw young Congressmen and Senators who 
     were pretty raw in the beginning, but they had open minds and 
     they grew and they developed new convictions and they 
     developed new horizons. One example was John and Robert 
     Kennedy--changing before your eyes. And John Dingell and Bob 
     Byrd are examples of this, and my brother--yes, my brother. 
     It did not take him long to enlarge his mind and encompass 
     it. And that is a great gift--to be open minded and have the 
     capacity to grow. It's a very great gift. And can we see 
     members of congress now, too many of them that come in with 
     fixed ideologies and fixed views, and they will stay for 
     10 or 25 years, and when they leave they have the very 
     same views. They haven't changed a damn thing. It's 
     pathetic.
       So now a lot of it's been covered, and I only have time to 
     hit a few high notes because I promised Mike Matz (executive 
     director of the Campaign for America's Wilderness) that I 
     would give out of my faulty memory some of the highlights of 
     the Wilderness bill. And this is an extraordinary story. The 
     wilderness idea--it originated here in this country. The 
     national park idea originated in this country --the idea of 
     setting aside areas. And Bob Marshall, Aldo Leopold, and a 
     little group came up with this, and it was thought to be a 
     far-out and crazy idea, and it culminated with the 
     introduction of the wilderness bill.
       One person left out was Humphrey, John Saylor--what a great 
     man he was. Thomas Kuchel, Republican from California was 
     one. And he shortly became the deputy leader--the whip to 
     Everett Dirksen, and the reason we got an overwhelming 
     bipartisan vote, in the Senate, was Tom Kuchel. Tom Kuchel, 
     so give him credit for it. What a great, great man he was. To 
     show you the spirit of bipartisanship, we worked on Point 
     Reyes together. When I went to his office, he'd say, ``Hi 
     Stewie, what do you want today?'' And that's the way it was 
     in that period. But the Wilderness Bill--Howard Zahniser--Mr. 
     Zahniser--the man was a saint. He rewrote and touched up that 
     bill 60 times over a period of 8 years. Every time Aspinall 
     raised a new argument, he'd work on a little language and 
     tried to offset it. He was truly a saintly person--a poet, a 
     lover of Thoreau, a wonderful man.
       But when the wilderness bill got off the ground, and too 
     much we, all of us, when it's all over, like to take credit. 
     I have been given more than my share tonight. Two persons I 
     would single out are President John F. Kennedy and Senator 
     Clinton Anderson of New Mexico. Clint Anderson had been as a 
     young insurance man, a personal friend of Aldo Leopold 
     in Albuquerque, and when he became chairman of the 
     Committee after the 1960 election, and Kennedy was 
     president. I didn't tell Kennedy what to do. Clint 
     Anderson went to the White House and said, ``Kennedy 
     didn't campaign on wilderness, I can't find anything in 
     the campaign.'' He said put in your message to Congress on 
     conservation--Presidents used to send up such messages, if 
     they had a conservation program--a call for the enactment 
     of a wilderness bill along the lines of Senate bill five--
     his bill. Kennedy put it in, and that electrified the 
     country--to have a call like that. And in July the bill 
     went to the floor of the Senate, and I'll tell you I was 
     startled. I was startled, Senator Byrd. The vote was 78 to 
     12, and people all over the country--the 
     conservationists--suddenly began to arouse and see how 
     much power they have.
       We give too much credit in my view--I was a Congressman--to 
     members of Congress. Lyndon Johnson was great at that--``the 
     Congress, they did it''. They enact laws, yes. But there was 
     an upsurge, an uplifting of people. Conservation had been put 
     on the shelf after Pearl Harbor and then there was a Cold War 
     and Kennedy issued a call for national seashores and we got 
     started on 14 of them. Some of them passed later on, but I 
     have to say what made it all possible was a bipartisanship 
     and affection between the members of the old generation--my 
     generation. We were depression kids, we fought the war, we 
     believed in mutual respect. That was what made it so 
     wonderful in those days. And that spirit carried forward. 
     Richard Nixon was a damn good conservation president.
       I like metaphors, and I have likened what happened--we just 
     saw the Olympics--to a relay race, because the work and 
     conservation in those days was never finished. There was a 
     pipeline. Heavens, it took Gaylord Nelson--because he wanted 
     the people to accept it--12 years to do the Apostle Islands 
     National Seashore. It took Bill Hart 10 years to do Sleeping 
     Bear Dunes in Michigan. And this meant that when we came, and 
     a different party won the White House, you carried the baton. 
     I am not sure Nixon understood in the beginning, but they 
     took it and they ran with it. Russell Train, Nat Reed--
     those wonderful people who put that ad in the newspaper 
     last month that said ``Come back to the mainstream, come 
     back to the main stream.'' And Gerald Ford carried it on, 
     and Jimmy Carter. And then--no names mentioned--but a 
     Secretary of the Interior when 1981 began, refused. In 
     fact, he said--and I never understood where he was coming 
     from--we've been going in the wrong direction for the last 
     20 years, so he wouldn't take the baton. And it has been 
     on the floor ever since.
       The bipartisanship by these five presidents was ended, and 
     I want to say because there is so much doublespeak these 
     days--don't let a president or his people say because he 
     signed a wilderness bill that he is for wilderness. Does he 
     issue a call for more wilderness? That's the test. That's the 
     test. The Land and Water Conservation Fund--oh I can take 
     some credit on that, but I won't--too long. Do you know, 10 
     billion dollars in 1960 dollars, Senator Byrd, went into that 
     program and half of it went to the states and they matched 
     it, and almost 40 thousand projects--cities, counties, open 
     space, playgrounds--boy, do we need playgrounds with this 
     plague of obesity that is claiming this country. We ought to 
     go back to that program.
       Well that's enough, I guess, and you know how strongly I 
     feel. The fight is not over, as everyone has said tonight. 
     And we may have gaps and we have an ebb and flow. I'd like to 
     believe, I am a troubled optimist, but there will be a flow 
     again in terms of wilderness preservation. And I like to end, 
     and my vision is gone so I have to memorize things. I can't 
     use notes, I just blabber away. Congressman Aspinall--from 
     Colorado--was an honorable man, as John Dingell and I have 
     discussed. He was strong-headed, but an honorable man. Very 
     stubborn and he could be dictatorial. He wouldn't even let 
     his committee consider the bill--no hearings--no bill 
     reported. John Saylor would say, ``Wayne, you cannot get away 
     with this forever,'' and we tried to persuade him. Where was 
     he? He said to me once, Stuart--I was one of his boys, I 
     trained under him, he taught you a lot of things--and he 
     said people that don't understand me, don't understand 
     that my congressional district is a mining district. It 
     had been a mining district. He was a great champion of the 
     American Mining Congress. He regarded a wilderness bill as 
     a lock up. That was the argument that Howard Zanhiser had 
     to work against all the time. He said, ``Stuart, you may 
     get a bill from out of my committee, but you might not 
     recognize it.'' And so it came to a compromise. And he and 
     Clinton Anderson were two old bulls that ended up hating 
     and distrusting each other. And Anderson's bill had all of 
     the elements, the framework, and the language about how 
     you identified a wilderness bill and how you passed a 
     wilderness bill. And Anderson put in 50 million acres of 
     lands that the Forest Service largely had already 
     identified. Aspinall cut it back to nine. And they made 
     the compromise because Anderson had to give in if he 
     wanted to get a wilderness bill. So it was cut way back. 
     Aspinall thought it might be true today--but not in the 
     next 20 or 30 years--that if every bill had to pass 
     individually through the Senate and House, that 
     Congressmen who held the views that he did, would not want 
     a wilderness in their area because it was locking up very 
     valuable resources. And so that is the way it played out. 
     And the wilderness bill--the essential elements of the 
     wilderness bill--were there when the bill was passed. And 
     this was a great moment for the country. What happened was 
     the citizens all over the country--in the West and the 
     East, the Congressmen and the Senators got behind 
     wilderness bills, and that is why we have the 110 million 
     acres today.

[[Page S9929]]

       I have to say one final thing about Mo Udall, my brother, 
     and this is getting back, Senator Byrd, to your book because 
     the whole democratic process as far as I can see, is gone in 
     the House of Representatives. It's gone. We have another man 
     that says no bill will go out of his committee unless it 
     meets my personal standards. What kind of democracy is that? 
     Mo Udall was committed to the idea--he wrote a book, it's 
     been thrown away, ``The Job of A Congressman.'' A bill is 
     introduced, you have hearings--everybody that wants to be 
     heard can be heard--you have field hearings, you mark up a 
     bill, the committees work their will--if it can survive 
     the committee it goes to the floor of the House and the 
     House works its will. That's democracy, and that's what he 
     was committed to, and that is gone now. Things are tucked 
     into appropriation bills now. A democracy has been watered 
     down and disappeared, and that is one of the things 
     Senator Byrd's book is about.
       So let's bear that in mind, but don't give up. Don't give 
     out--the fight goes on. I'm finally going to end, I'm sorry, 
     I got carried away. The case for wilderness was made against 
     the lock up argument by Clinton Anderson, who said 
     ``wilderness is an anchor to windward.'' Knowing it is there, 
     we can go about our business of managing our resources wisely 
     and not be a people in despair, ransacking our public lands 
     for the last barrel of oil, the last board of timber, the 
     last blade of grass, the last tank of water. That was Clint 
     Anderson's answer to the lock up argument.
       Wallace Stenger, as usual, caught the spirit in that 
     wonderful essay he wrote in 1960. He said, ``We need this 
     wild country even if we do no more than go to the edge and 
     look in. We need it as a symbol of our sanity as creatures as 
     part of the geography of hope.'' And Ansel Adams, the great 
     photographer said it in a different way, and I once said, 
     ``Ansel, can I apply your statement to the Grand Canyon and 
     Yosemite?'' ``Of course,'' he said Ansel was writing home 
     after his first trip to New Mexico and he used these words: 
     All is very beautiful and magical here. He is talking about 
     the landscape. ``All is beautiful and magical here.'' A 
     quality one cannot describe. He said, ``The sky and the land 
     is so enormous and that the detail is so precise and 
     exquisite,'' the eye of the photographer--``that wherever you 
     are, there is a golden glow and everything is sideways under 
     you and over you, and the clocks stopped long ago.''
       Keep up the fight, and good night.

  Mrs. FEINSTEIN. Mr. President, this month our Nation celebrates the 
40th anniversary of the Wilderness Act. To commemorate the anniversary 
of this landmark legislation, I want to take a few moments to highlight 
the historic importance of this law, and remind us of some of the work 
remaining to be done.
  When President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Wilderness Act into law 
on September 3, 1964, it became our unambiguous national policy ``to 
secure for the American people of present and future generations the 
benefits of an enduring resource of wilderness.''
  The legislation empowered those of us in Congress, with the ultimate 
approval of the President, to designate Federal lands for protection as 
part of our national wilderness preservation system. It was a 
tremendous accomplishment, immediately placing some 1.2 million acres 
of wilderness in 13 areas on national forest lands throughout my home 
State of California under statutory protection. And it protected 
another 8 million acres of land in other States.
  But that was only the start. Over the ensuing four decades, 
Californians have welcomed acts of Congress that have expanded most of 
those initial areas. Today, those original 13 wilderness areas have 
grown to 1.7 million acres of wilderness firmly protected by statute.
  The Wilderness Act also required that numerous other areas of Federal 
land be studied, with local public hearings, leading to Presidential 
recommendations for additional wilderness areas. Congress has enacted 
those proposals in California, beginning with the great San Rafael 
Wilderness near Santa Barbara in 1969--the first area added to the 
national wilderness system after the Wilderness Act became law.
  Another early study focused on the 50,000-acre Ventana Primitive Area 
in the mountains along the central California coast above Big Sur--an 
area the U.S. Forest Service preserved in the 1930s. The study led 
Congress to establish the 98,000-acre Ventana Wilderness in 1969, with 
the leadership, among others, of California Senator Thomas Kuchel.
  Since that time we have revisited this area in four additional laws, 
most recently when we passed and President George W. Bush signed a law 
in late 2002 further expanding this wilderness. As a result, the 
Ventana Wilderness now covers 240,000 acres.
  Beyond the original Wilderness Act study areas, our California 
delegation has listened carefully to the diverse voices of the people 
of California. Year after year, we receive proposals for wilderness 
protection that come to us from ordinary citizens and organizations in 
our State, most often working in close consultation with the 
Federal land managing agencies involved and our State government.

  Many of these proposals have been enacted, particularly for lands 
administered by the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land 
Management. As a result of all this work, California now boasts 130 
wilderness areas comprising 14 million acres.
  These California wilderness areas offer a diverse spectrum of 
landscapes and ecosystems, recreational opportunities and scenic 
vistas, from the high peaks and forested valleys of the Sierra, to the 
extraordinarily wild deserts that Senator Alan Cranston and I fought to 
protect in the California Desert Protection Act of 1994--one of my 
proudest achievements for the people of California.
  In celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Wilderness Act, I 
particularly stress that the work of preserving California's wilderness 
heritage has always been a bipartisan endeavor. In our State, we enjoy 
wilderness areas found in the congressional districts of both Democrats 
and Republicans, protected in laws signed by every President since this 
program began 40 years ago--Presidents Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, 
Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill 
Clinton, and George W. Bush.
  The act itself became law after 8 years of congressional debate. 
Endorsed by the Eisenhower administration and the administrations of 
Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, the act was shaped by 
practical-minded people, mostly westerners. It is, as Senator Kuchel 
said during those Senate debates, ``reasonable . . . not extreme in any 
degree.''
  Senator Kuchel insisted that the law not conflict with State water 
rights and that the act respect existing mining claims and established 
grazing uses. At the same time, Senator Kuchel reminded his colleagues 
that protecting wilderness watersheds is key to abundant, clean water 
supplies--the lifeblood of California's ranching and agricultural 
sector, our thriving cities and towns, and the economic well-being of 
our entire Nation.
  Still, there is more wilderness to be protected and more work to be 
done. These days, Federal lands that deserve a fair look by Congress 
are, in some cases, under threat from other kinds of use that are 
inconsistent with the preservation of wilderness. This is the kind of 
careful balancing Congress undertakes as we make these decisions.
  This Congress has a great opportunity to preserve even more stunning 
wilderness by completing action on the Northern California Coastal Wild 
Heritage Wilderness Act that I have cosponsored with my colleague 
Senator Barbara Boxer. This bill has the strong and effective support 
of Representative Mike Thompson, in whose district every acre of its 
proposed wilderness areas is situated, and the support of numerous 
cosponsors, including California Representatives from both sides of the 
aisle.

  Among the 300,000 acres this priority bill would protect is the 
42,000-acre King Range Wilderness, a wild expanse on our California 
``lost coast'' south of Eureka. Many of the proposals in this bill are 
based on agency recommendations or proposals by local citizens like the 
Humboldt County nurse who has been working to save the King Range for 
20 years. These areas enjoy strong support, as wilderness, from local 
business owners in the area, from hunting and fishing enthusiasts, from 
dedicated backpackers to young parents hiking or backpacking to 
introduce their children or their grandchildren to nature at its most 
wild.
  Similarly worthy, bipartisan proposals await action for wilderness 
sponsored by our colleagues from New Mexico and Washington. And no less 
worthy is the proposed wilderness area designation for an area on the 
Caribbean National Forest in Puerto Rico--a wilderness area proposed by 
the U.S. Forest Service more than three decades ago.

[[Page S9930]]

  As we consider these wilderness proposals, we can generally rely upon 
existing standards and interpretations of the Wilderness Act. Thanks to 
our predecessors we have a wealth of guidance in the legislative 
history of the Wilderness Act and the more than 100 laws Congress has 
enacted since to protect additional lands.
  Now, as we celebrate the 40th year of the Wilderness Act, the 
preservation of our wilderness has never been more important. 
Population growth, especially in the Western United States, is placing 
increased pressure on our public lands. That is why it was so critical 
that our leaders acted 40 years ago and why it is urgent that we 
continue to preserve our Nation's natural treasures today.
  John Muir once said, ``Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, 
places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength 
to body and soul alike.''
  For 40 years, the Wilderness Act has entrusted Congress and the 
American people with the means to preserve that beauty.

                          ____________________