[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.