“This bill includes the Federal Ocean Acidification Research and Monitoring (FOARAM) Act”
Saying it was fitting that the seasons were shifting from winter to spring, as attention turned to the outdoors, President Obama signed the huge omnibus lands bill into law today.
He remarked that many of these bills, some 160 all rolled into one piece of legislation, were years, if not decades in the making. The law allows for 2 million more acres to be declared wilderness, largely in nine states — many in the West; more than 1,000 miles designated as scenic rivers, and adds land for national trails.
From coast to coast, Mr. Obama said, this bill “protects treasured places from the Appalachians of Virginia and West Virginia to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula; from the canyons of Idaho to the sandstone cliffs of Utah; from the Sierra Nevadas in California to the Badlands of Oregon.”
At the ceremony, the president also quoted a legendary outdoorsman. “As our greatest conservationist President, Teddy Roosevelt, put it almost a century ago, “I recognize the right and duty of this generation to develop and use the natural resources of our land; but I do not recognize the right to waste them, or to rob, by wasteful use, the generations that come after us.”
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Kate Phillips, The New York Times, 1 April 2009. Full article.
