[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 34, Number 31 (Monday, August 3, 1998)]
[Pages 1538-1542]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks at the American Heritage Rivers Designation Ceremony in Ashe 
County, North Carolina

July 30, 1998

    The President. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you for the warm 
welcome. Thank you for being here. Thank you, Sheila Morgan. Didn't she 
do a good job? [Applause]
    I want to----
    Audience member. We love you, Mr. President!
    The President. Thank you, ma'am. [Laughter]
    I want to thank all of you. I want to especially thank my good 
friend Governor Hunt, America's premier and senior Governor on so many 
issues and especially the education of our children. He's done a 
wonderful job for you.
    I want to thank Congressman Burr for his statement, his commitment, 
his support of this project, and proving once again that at its best, 
America's commitment to our natural environment and our children's 
future is a bipartisan effort.
    I want to thank Congressman Rahall, my good friend from West 
Virginia, for reminding us that Virginia and West Virginia are also a 
part of the New River designation and very proud of it.
    I thank Chair of the Federal Advisory Commission, Dayton Duncan, and 
the other members who are here today; the chair of the American Heritage 
River Alliance, Peter Stroh. I think the North Carolina poet laureate, 
Fred Chappell, is here, and I thank him for coming. I hope he'll write a 
poem about this.
    I want to say to Chairman Yeats and Mayors Baldwin, Brown, and 
Hightower, we're glad to be here in your neighborhood.
    I would like to say a special word of thanks to the Vice President 
for the magnificent record he has established in protecting our 
environment and in so many other areas of our national life. And to my 
great, good friend Erskine Bowles, perhaps the most effective Chief of 
Staff any President ever had, and a relentless promoter of North 
Carolina and the New River.

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    I think the Vice President would agree with me when I say on October 
1st we will close our books on the old budget year and open our books on 
the new one, and for the first time in 29 long years America is going to 
have a balanced budget and a surplus, thanks in no small measure to 
Erskine Bowles' leadership.
    I want to thank all the people who made this day possible, the young 
people, the River Builders; I thank the young AmeriCorps volunteers who 
are here. I thank all the older people who also worked hard. I don't 
know how in the world you all got this place outfitted for this many 
people in no more time than you had to work on it, but I hope we could 
all join one more time in thanking Bill and Lula Severt and their 
family. The Severts have been great to make us at home in their home. 
Thank you, bless you.
    Can you imagine how he felt--they said, ``How would you like to just 
take out a minute or two in a couple of weeks, Bill, to entertain the 
President, the Vice President, the Governor, two Congressmen, and 6,500 
of their closest friends.'' [Laughter] Just another day on the farm. 
[Laughter]
    In just a few moments I will sign a proclamation making all this 
official, awarding our Nation's first American Heritage Rivers 
designations to the New River, the Blackstone and Woonasquatucket, the 
Connecticut, the Cuyahoga, the Detroit, the Hanalei, the Hudson, the 
Upper and Lower Mississippi, the Potomac, the Rio Grande, the St. Johns, 
the Upper Susquehanna and Lackawanna, and the Willamette. Those places 
tell you an awful lot about America. They span our history. They span 
our country. They capture our imagination.
    I want to congratulate the communities that participated in all 
these--all these--designations, and also those who worked so hard who 
didn't quite make it this time. It was an amazing process.
    You know, for 5\1/2\ years the Vice President and I have worked hard 
to honor one of our Nation's oldest, most enduring values, to preserve 
for future generations the Earth God gave us. That's really what this 
river initiative is all about.
    The First Lady has headed up our coming celebration moving toward 
the year 2000 of the millennium, starting a new century and a new 
thousand years. And she came up with this theme that we should honor the 
past and imagine the future. You may have seen a few days ago she went 
out to Fort McHenry, where the Star-Spangled Banner flew, to celebrate 
the restoration of the Star-Spangled Banner; then on to the home of 
Thomas Edison, Harriet Tubman, and then to George Washington's 
Revolutionary War headquarters--the thing that got North Carolina into 
this country in the first place and put it in a position to give up 
Tennessee. [Laughter]
    So I think----

[At this point, the President looked at Vice President Gore.]

    The President. He's laughing. [Laughter] I'll hear about that later.
    What we do today is an important part of honoring our past, and it's 
far more distant, and it also will stretch far, far into the future. 
Like the ring of a stately old oak, the currents of our rivers carry 
remarkable stories.
    The New River tells stories of a region, the southern Appalachian 
region, where tight-knit communities remain true to tradition, where 
neighbors share a vision of wise stewardship of water and land. It tells 
the stories of our emerging Nation, for Colonel Peter Jefferson, Thomas 
Jefferson's father, surveyed this river, and Daniel Boone trapped here 
for beaver and bear.
    It tells stories of earlier settlements through tools left by the 
Canaway, Cherokee, and Creek. It tells the story of our planet, for 
scientists can tell by the river's location and direction of flow that 
it is not only the oldest river in North America but the second oldest 
river on the face of the Earth.
    The other American Heritage Rivers all have compelling stories of 
their own, but there is one story all these rivers share, the story of 
communities rallying around their rivers the way neighbors rally around 
each other in time of need or to get something done in the community.
    Sheila talked about what you did here. In each and every community 
that won this designation--and, I add, those who came close, and there 
were dozens of them--we were

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simply overwhelmed by the cooperation between interests who often 
disagree and by the creative but practical plans forged by communities 
for protecting natural resources, spurring revitalization of the 
economy, and preserving cultural heritage.
    Now we intend to work with you to realize our plans. This is the 
beginning, not the end, of this celebration. First, let me say, there 
will be no Federal mandates, no restrictions on property holders' 
rights. Our goal instead is to help local groups enhance historic rivers 
and make them attractive and commercially vibrant even as we preserve 
their environmental characteristics.
    Here, for example, we'll start working with the New River Heritage 
Task Force to help family farmers increase their incomes with 
alternative crops and innovative techniques, while cutting the flow of 
pollutants into the river. On the Detroit River we'll help to revitalize 
an urban waterfront to bring new opportunity to downtown Detroit. On the 
St. Johns River we will help to control future floods and enhance 
environmental protection for rare species like the manatee. On each and 
every one of these rivers, we will help to unite our communities to 
further our country's river renaissance.
    For nearly three decades now, as the Congressman said earlier and as 
the Vice President echoed, our Nation has made strong, visible, 
bipartisan progress in cleaning up our environment, while enhancing our 
economy at the same time. Today, our economy is the strongest in a 
generation, but we also have cleaner air, cleaner water, fewer toxic 
waste dumps, safer food, the cleanest environment in a generation. And 
we should be proud of that. The two go hand in hand.
    I want to talk a little politics, but not partisan politics, with 
you. Jim Hunt and I were riding out here, and I looked at all those 
folks waving to me with their American flags. And I said, ``Jim, is this 
a Democrat area or a Republican area?'' [Laughter] He said, ``It's about 
50-50.'' He said, ``It comes and goes.'' [Laughter] I said, ``Kind of 
like America.''
    Well, I want to ask you to manifest the bipartisan or nonpartisan 
commitment I see in this crowd today to the environment in your voices 
in Washington, because some folks in Congress are no longer committed to 
bipartisan progress on the environment. They really do see, I believe 
honestly, polluted streams and fields or noxious air as overstated 
problems that can be put off for another day.
    We can only deal with this if we have progress, not partisanship, 
because here are the facts: Today, 40 percent of our waters are still 
too polluted for fishing and swimming. That's why I launched the Clean 
Water Action Plan to help communities finish the job that the Vice 
President mentioned. So far, Congress has refused to fully fund this 
initiative. I ask them to reconsider. I think every child in America 
ought to have the same chance your children do to fish or swim or float 
on a river that's clean and pure.
    We need progress, not partisanship, to protect our land. Last 
February, several months ago, I submitted a list of 100 new sites we can 
add to our Nation's endowment of protected lands, including a beautiful 
site here in the southern Appalachians along the trout-rich Thompson 
River. While Congress has appropriated the money to preserve these 
natural and historic treasures, under the law the leadership must 
approve the release of the funds. And so far they haven't done it. So 
today I ask again, let's work together to protect these wonders. The 
money is in the bank. The sites have been identified. They're not going 
anywhere, but we need to preserve them for everyone for all time.
    We also need to work together to meet the challenge of climate 
change, which has already been mentioned by the Governor and others. Let 
me tell you, folks, the first time I had a long talk with Al Gore, he 
showed me this book he wrote, ``Earth in the Balance,'' which I had 
already read and understood about half of. [Laughter] And he whipped out 
this chart showing how much more elements we were putting in the air in 
the form of greenhouse gases that were heating the planet.
    And I listened, and it made a lot of sense to me, but I didn't know 
anybody who believed it or at least not enough to actually come up with 
a plan. Well, now we know that the 9 hottest years in history have 
occurred in the last 11 years, that the 5 hottest years in history have 
occurred in the 1990's, that 1997 was the hottest year ever recorded

[[Page 1541]]

on Earth, and every month of 1998 has broken the 1997 record in America. 
And I'm glad the clouds came up and made me cool while I'm saying that.
    But there is a way, just like there has always been a way. Since we 
started doing this in 1970, there has always been a way for us to 
preserve the environment and grow the economy. There is a way for us to 
meet the challenge of climate change and global warming and continue to 
grow the economy. We just have to be innovative, and we have to be 
willing to change.
    And again, I have not proposed a lot of big, burdensome new 
regulations; I have proposed tax incentives and investments in new 
technologies and partnerships so we can reduce the harmful fumes we put 
into the atmosphere from transportation, from construction, from 
utilities, from all the work we do. We can do this. This is not going to 
be that hard once we make up our mind.
    But I can tell you, we can never do it unless there are Democrats 
and Republicans for it. We never make any real progress on any great 
challenge unless we go forward together. And I ask you to ask our 
country to go forward as you have gone forward together here. We need 
these programs for energy efficiency, renewable energy, and tax 
incentives. They've long enjoyed the support of business and 
environmentalists; they should enjoy the support of Congress.
    And we also need to stop using legislative gimmicks in Washington to 
weaken environmental protection. In the Senate, for example, lawmakers 
have attached to bills that are totally unrelated devices called riders 
that would cripple our wildlife protection efforts, deny taxpayers a 
fair return on oil leasing on public lands, allow a $30 million road 
through a wildlife refuge in Alaska, the first road ever through a 
Federal wilderness. We don't need to do this. We need to keep going 
forward.
    Look out at that river and just imagine, just try to imagine what it 
would be like to be 300 million years old. I'm grateful for our economic 
prosperity. I'm grateful for the fact that the crime rate is down, and 
we have the smallest percentage of our people on welfare in 29 years. 
I'm grateful for these things. But you know and I know that the world is 
still changing fast, that there are many challenges out there that we're 
trying to meet right now--the challenge of the problems that our friends 
in Asia have which could affect the whole world economy, just for 
example. We're trying to deal with wars of racial and religious and 
ethnic hatred that could spill into other countries and engage our young 
people again.
    We know that we will have future challenges because in the nature of 
things, once you solve one set of problems there's always a new set of 
challenges coming along. That's one of the gifts that God has given us. 
So we'll always have new challenges, but you'll always have the New 
River, too.
    For those of us who are old enough to be parents or grandparents, we 
know when our children and grandchildren are our age the facts of their 
lives might be a little different. It's kind of heartening to know, 
isn't it, that the New River will be the same because of what you are 
doing here today.
    This ancient river has flowed through the heart of this land for 
millions of years--hundreds of millions of years longer than blood has 
flowed through any human heart. The Cherokee even say that this was the 
very first river created by the Great Spirit's hand. Who are we, such 
brief visitors on this Earth, to disturb it? But when we cherish it and 
save it and hand it on to our children, we have done what we were 
charged to do, not only in our own Constitution and history but by our 
Maker.
    You should be very, very proud of yourselves today. I thank you for 
what you have done. God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 1:08 p.m. at the Severt family farm. In his 
remarks, he referred to Sheila Morgan, co-owner of the Todd General 
Store on the New River, who introduced the President; Gov. James B. Hunt 
of North Carolina; George Yeats, chairman, Ashe County Commission; Mayor 
Dale Baldwin of West Jefferson, NC; Mayor Dayna Brown of Lansing, NC; 
Mayor D.E. Hightower, Jefferson, NC; and Bill and Lula Severt, who 
hosted the event. A tape was not available for verification of the 
content of these remarks.

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