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each other and moving across this landscape and drawing their living and their inspiration and their spirituality from a landscape." Doesn't it make sense in light of a subsequent 100 years of understanding to say that we have room in the West to protect the landscape, an -- if you will -- an anthropological ecosystem. The real science on these landscapes doesn't come out of digging out a room and extracting a few pots. That was the 19th century - and it was important. The real discoveries today come from asking the deeper question of "How did communities manage to live in spiritual and physical equilibrium with the landscape?" And don't we need to assess all of the traces that have been left in so many intense and variegated ways, whether it's with petro glyphs, diversion structures for water, rarnadas, all of those things. So, that's the question in Southwestern Colorado. Do we have the wisdom and foresight to say, before it's too late, before these landscapes start to get chopped up: We can do better than to protect five or six Indian ruins out on that land and say that there is room in this culture for a quarter million acres from which we honor the past and, more importantly, learn, and take inspiration from the past. Now, the Colorado delegation in the last day or two, maybe week, has introduced a bill to establish a protected area along these lines. Now, the hour is late. This discussion has been going on for a year now. And I am reminded of the Arizona experience. So we're going to have a, I think, very important moment in which we're now in, say, the seventh inning and this team isn't just going to walk off the field. So, we have a nice dialogue going there. Now, let me take you to the San Luis Valley. Because, this too illustrates these lessons. The San Luis Valley is, first of all, an important cultural landscape. It represents the northernmost reach of Spain in the 17th Century. The Spanish Empire made its way northward up the Rio Grande to the founding of Santa Fe in 1620, the subsequent spread of Spanish culture through northern New Mexico and into the San Luis Valley. If you go down to those towns in the San Luis Valley, those communities are still there. And their traditions are intensely alive. They speak oftheir presence on that landscape as if the 17th Century were just yesterday. And what's happened on that landscape is a series of eyents which began about a decade ago when the City of Denver - I shouldn't say the City of Denver, I should say some promoters in the best western fashion - decided that they could sell water to Denver by going to the San Luis Valley, where there is a huge groundwater basin which has been charged with water since the glacial ages, and pump that water out, and send it into Denver. Now, I think you can see the implications of that kind of decision. That's basically saying "We will take a rural valley, that's been inhabited by people on the land for three centuries and destroy the rural culture in the name of satisfying projected demands in Denver." Do I exaggerate by saying it would destroy the valley? No. Because, you're going to have a groundwater table that's got a 1,000 feet of water in it, as the promoters were saying "There's a Lake Huron underground in the San Luis Valley." What they neglect to mention is that it's the top 100 feet of Lake Huron that sustains the landscape, the springs the wetlands, which nourish the migrating flocks that come down of the Western flyway from Alaska to Central America, but when you take the top 1 00 feet off of Lake Huron the landscape goes dry, the springs disappear, the creeks dry up, and the people who have been living in balance in this valley are, all of the sudden, at the mercy of outsiders. Enter a National Monument called Great Sand Dunes National Monument. It's an interesting National Monument. Kind oflike what there is in Southwestern Colorado. It was established by Presidential proclamation back in the days when people thought of the landscape as full of t I e e e tit