Media Advisory ** Media Advisory ** Media Advisory

Office of the Secretary

For immediate release: February 16, 2000

Contact: John Wright, Jamie Workman (202) 208-6416

BABBITT UNVEILS, DEFINES CONTOURS OF HISTORIC
NEW NATIONAL SYSTEM OF CONSERVATION LANDS

Compares, contrasts Bureau of Land Management's new and growing family of protected National Landscape Monuments and Conservation Areas to existing
National Wildlife Refuge and National Parks systems

In remarks Thursday at 10:30 am at the University of Denver Law School, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt unveils the shape, origins and unexpected direction of a new land conservation system that, he says, ranks alongside National Parks and Wildlife Refuges as a creative approach to protecting America's natural legacy.

"After doubling the size of conservation lands in and around the Grand Canyon, the press noted how, during his tenure President Clinton, with the help of Congress, has surpassed even Theodore Roosevelt in protecting America's great natural resources," said Babbitt. "What they missed is the deeper, larger and more complex story: how, like TR, we have created an entirely new and visionary system in the process."

Babbitt will trace the contours and history of that new system - tentatively called National Landscape Monuments - from "bureaucratic mule" (cobbled together in 1946 'without pride of ancestry nor hope of progeny') to the proud father of vast, ecologically critical, recreationally active and visually spectacular units throughout the West that it has recently matured into.

The popular assumption was that new protection of nationally significant landscapes - Grand Staircase-Escalante in Utah, Grand Canyon Parashant in Arizona or Headwaters Reserve in California, for example -- would involve either the Park Service or the US Fish and Wildlife Service taking control. Breaking with tradition, that didn't happen. Why? What's the difference? How would they work, then?

Babbitt describes what dynamics led the Administration to turn these areas over to the little known agency that quietly manages more land than the Forest Service, Park Service and Fish and Wildlife Service. He compares and contrasts the BLM's management approach -- to roads, visitors centers, communities, interpretations, grazing, local economies, or hunting -- with these other agencies, and shows how and why BLM is often uniquely suited to manage the overlapping human and natural communities in the West.

The text of his remarks "From Grand Staircase to Grand Canyon Parashant: Is There a Monumental Future for the BLM?" will be made available Thursday night and downloaded off the internet.

-DOI-

U.S. Department of the Interior