The Seattle Times
Editorials & Opinion: Thursday, February 13, 2003
Guest columnist

The President's Commitment To Preserving Wild Places
By Gale A. Norton
Special to The Times

If you travel southward from Seattle along Puget Sound, you eventually reach a beautiful river delta where salt water and fresh water converge to provide habitat for sandpipers, waterfowl, hawks, salmon, otters and some 300 other species of wildlife.

Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge is one of the largest remaining undisturbed estuaries in Washington state, a special place where thousands of visitors each year experience the natural world as it was before we built cities of asphalt and cement.

One hundred years ago, President Theodore Roosevelt recognized the importance of preserving such places when he established the first national wildlife refuge on Pelican Island, off the coast of Florida.

Today, the National Wildlife Refuge System that Roosevelt founded has become the largest network of lands in the world dedicated to wildlife conservation, with 540 refuges in all 50 states, including more than 20 in Washington.

President Bush is dedicated to ensuring this system continues to be healthy and well-managed for the next 100 years. He has proposed a large hike in the refuge system's budget for fiscal year 2004.

The president's proposed $25.5 million increase for our refuges comes on the heels of a record $56.5 million increase he proposed last year. If enacted by Congress, this would mean that the overall budget to run refuges will have more than doubled since 1997.

For the refuge managers at Nisqually, this will mean new funds to undertake projects they never could have before. Under the president's budget, refuge staff will have $260,000 to tackle pressing projects such as working with the Nisqually Tribe to replace dilapidated fences needed to keep cattle out of fragile estuaries vital to spawning chinook salmon. They can repair visitor and education facilities.

Getting needed funds for refuges such as Nisqually is just part of the president's commitment to protecting our nation's treasures in Washington. His budget also includes funds for 12 major maintenance projects at Olympic National Park and Mount Rainier National Park, including rehabilitation of trails and campsites.

In addition, the president is proposing an $8 million increase for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's national fish hatchery system and hatchery program, the first time since the 1980s that any president has proposed an increase of this magnitude for this program. In Washington, for example, this will allow biologists to track 150,000 chinook salmon produced at two federal hatcheries, an important step in recovery efforts for this threatened species.

As secretary of interior, I have the responsibility of managing vast swaths of public land — about one in every five acres of America. As development expands outward from our cities, these public lands are ever more important as places for wildlife habitat and for people to be refreshed by the soothing touch of the natural world.

Even more important, they are places where our children can learn the value of a wetland or be stopped in their tracks by the amazing sight of hundreds of thousands of migrating shorebirds descending on a mud flat, as they do each spring and fall at Grays Harbor National Wildlife Refuge on Washington's coastline. Children who learn to love wild places and wild creatures when they are young will take care of them when they are older.

Ironically, the struggle to conserve places such as the Nisqually and Grays Harbor refuges takes place as much in the hallways of Washington, D.C., as on the ground in Washington state. In a time when budgets are under pressure, I am pleased that President Bush has found significant new money in his budget for our refuges, hatcheries and parks.

Teddy Roosevelt once said "a nation behaves well if it treats the natural resources as assets which it must turn over to the next generation increased and not impaired in value."

As we mark the centennial of the first national wildlife refuge, the president's budget honors Roosevelt's legacy and commits our nation to the future conservation of our refuges.

Gale A. Norton is the U.S. secretary of interior