    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1993, Book II)]
    [August 13, 1993]
    [Pages 1376-1377]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks on Signing the Colorado Wilderness Act of 1993 in Denver
    August 13, 1993

        Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Senator Campbell, ladies
    and gentlemen. I am delighted to be back in Colorado. I'll be back
    tomorrow and the next day and the next day. I really wanted to come here
    for this bill signing because not only of the wilderness, and it's
    important to me personally, but also because this effort reflects what I
    think our country needs more of: people who are willing to go after
    something and stay after it as long as it takes, and people in the end
    who are willing to sit down and reason together and work together and
    feel that they're stronger when they reach agreement rather than weaker.
    I hope, as Senator Brown characterized this process, I'd like to bring
    it to more of the problems our great Nation faces, although I hope none
    of them take 12 years to resolve. [Laughter]
        I do want to thank all of the members of the Colorado delegation,
    without regard to party, for their work here. I especially thank
    Congressman Skaggs, my good friend Pat Schroeder, and Senator Campbell,
    and Senator Brown. And there are others who are not here. I want to say
    a special word of thanks to my friend of now more than 20 years, Senator
    Gary Hart,

    [[Page 1377]]

    and to Tim Wirth, who has done a magnificent job now in the State
    Department taking his environmental passion global. Even when I get bad
    press, Tim Wirth gets good press. He has been almost universally
    acclaimed for the breath of fresh air he has brought to the efforts of
    the United States to promote responsible policies to preserve and
    enhance life throughout this planet. And I'm glad to be here with him
    today. And I want you to know that even though he's not a Senator from
    Colorado anymore, he is serving the people of Colorado in an exemplary
    way.
        Almost 100 years ago to the day, not far from here, another visitor
    to Colorado was moved by what she saw, and she wrote a poem. She wrote
    of spacious skies and fruited plains and amber waves of grain. On that
    day Katherine Lee Bates described America the Beautiful. Today we return
    to reaffirm the beauty and the majesty of the land that she fell in love
    with and that we all hold dear. Today I come back to sign H.R. 631, the
    Colorado Wilderness Act, which designates a total of 612,000 acres, 19
    separate areas in our national forests, as components of the National
    Wilderness Preservation System. The Act also protects five areas
    totaling over 150,000 acres under management plans that are slightly
    less restrictive but still important. It protects rugged and roadless
    expanses, sets aside glacier-chiseled valleys and jagged peaks,
    preserves the calm of still mountain meadows and the cathedrals of magic
    old-growth groves.
        The names of the places we are preserving today provide more than
    ample proof of their majesty. Sangre de Cristo range is a haunting and
    painful image of a barren peak washed in sunset colors. Fossil Ridge
    speaks of wide-eyed children stumbling upon ancient relics, hopefully
    not as they turned out in ``Jurassic Park.'' [Laughter] Oh Be Joyful is
    surely a peak that will be noticed on any topographical map.
        At the same time as it protects these treasures, the Act releases
    about 115,000 acres of Forest Service lands in Colorado for other
    purposes, balancing the goal of preserving our environment with the need
    to provide for a healthy economy for the people who live and work here.
        It's been a dozen years since the last legislation designating
    wilderness in Colorado, a dozen since an administration has been
    committed to expanding wilderness delegations. In those years wilderness
    designations were questioned by those who wonder why these things must
    be set apart and saved. We save our wilderness because it reflects the
    diversity of the gifts of God that go with the diversity of our people
    and our culture and because many, many of us believe that its sheer
    grandeur offers us the clearest evidence we have here on Earth of divine
    providence. The great conservationist John Muir said, ``Everyone needs
    beauty,'' and that's why we save wilderness.
        I'd like to close today with a short message from Wallace Stegner to
    acknowledge his passing this past spring and to acknowledge the
    wilderness area of which he wrote so eloquently. ``The remainder and the
    reassurance that is still there is good for our spiritual health even if
    we never once in 10 years set foot on it,'' he wrote. ``It is good for
    us when we are young because of the incomparable sanity it can bring
    briefly, as vacation and rest, into our insane lives. It is important to
    us when we are old simply because it is there. Important, that is,
    simply as an idea.'' That idea, an essentially American idea, is
    embodied in this act of Congress. I thank all of you who made it
    possible. And I am proud to have the opportunity to sign it into law.
        Thank you very much.

    Note: The President spoke at 5:35 p.m. at Stapleton Airport. H.R. 631,
    approved August 13, was assigned Public Law No. 103-77.