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<br />~ <br /> <br />( <br /> <br />westward to Utah." It's about the Colorado River. It's the Colorado River stupid. I KNOW the <br />name of the river there. Whatever the tributaries are, it's the Colorado River. But the monument e <br />doesn't extend to the most obvious resource in the whole place - which is the Colorado River. <br /> <br />Western Colorado is dinosaur city. There are quarries all over the landscape. And it's a <br />wonderful complex. The quarries are all outside of the monument because, when this fellow <br />from Grand Junction was protecting the view he wasn't into dinosaurs or rivers, or wilderness <br />areas. So, doesn't that suggest that 100 years later it's time to assess our surroundings now that <br />there are 100 times as many people and say "What is it going to come to?" Do we have the <br />capacity to look up around us. Because, right now on this landscape it's pretty much either/or. Is <br />it going to be a postage-stamp park, or wide-open public domain on which anything goes - that's <br />called BLM land? And, once again, the dialogue we will continue this afternoon relates to "Can <br />we do it legislatively? Or must we do it by the more traditional method - but Presidential <br />Proclamation. " <br /> <br />Well, this in a nutshell is the dialogue that is taking place all over the West. It is taking place at <br />this point in time because people are uneasy about the future of the West. The population is <br />growing. People who came west precisely because of the extraordinary evocative power of the <br />land where they felt that they could live in a different relationship with creation, are now finding <br />that congestion, sprawl, thoughtless development, umestrained exploitation of the land is <br />threatening to erase the very values, in the deepest of ironies, that not only brought them here, <br />but created the very opportunity which now, carried on in linear, uncontrolled fashion, will <br />threaten the end of the possibility of a new vision and a sustainable way oflife on this landscape. <br /> <br />Thank you. <br /> <br />(APPLAUSE) <br /> <br />e <br /> <br />Begin question section: <br /> <br />BB: Okay -let's go. Yes. <br /> <br />Audience: Are you planning on addressing the issue of a new policy for management ofthese <br />landscapes? <br /> <br />Yes. The questioner is asking in short - you said you were going to come out here and talk about <br />a new system ofland conservation units under the administration ofBLM - and you're guilty of <br />false advertising because you haven't said a word about what was in the press release. <br />(LAUGHTER) Well, it's true. (LAUGHTER). <br /> <br />The institutional story is this, traditionally in the West when we've talked about monuments and <br />parks what it has meant is designating the landscape and then taking it away from the Bureau of <br />Land Management which administrates the public domain in the West. The Bureau of Land <br />Management has three times as much land as the National Park Service, twice as much as the <br />Forest Service. It is the owner of the matrix of public lands in the West. The traditional approach <br />is, you see something nice, you get up a big movement to protect it, and you take it away from <br />the Bureau of Land Management and give it to somebody else, namely typically the National <br />Park Service in some cases the National Wildlife Refuge System. And out of that has grown a <br />kind of perception that the BLM is sort of the Bureau of Leftovers, livestock and mining- <br />whatever you want to call it. But, it doesn't seem to me to be an adequate way of looking at the <br />Western landscape, because the largest land manager ought to be induced to have a sense of e <br />