Transcripts

SPEAKER: For some 50 years, I've fought for the preservation of that area. It's probably the most beautiful Lake Country on the continent, maybe in the world. And I know because I've traveled by canoe and clear up into the Canadian Arctic. Without question, it's one of the most beautiful lake countries in the world. All right, let's accept that.

Its chief charm is not its beauty but its wilderness quality. There are those who look at it as purely a means of making money, logging it, mining it, overrunning it with motorized vehicles of all kinds. And there are others who have a broader point of view-- the environmentalists who see the wilderness as of great value to people at large, psychological and sociological values far beyond the other.

The Boundary Waters Canoe Area has never been a pure wilderness. Because when it was created, certain adverse uses were allowed. But there's a bill before Congress now, entered by a Representative Don Fraser, which would change the name of the area from the Boundary Waters Canoe Area, which doesn't mean a thing to the Boundary Waters Wilderness Area. By making it a real wilderness area, it will instantly eliminate all adverse uses.

There's another bill by a Congressman James Oberstar, who wants to chop up the wilderness and make recreational areas, which would permit most adverse uses. So those of us who feel that the Fraser bill is right are hoping that it will pass because it will solve the confusion and the bickering and the fighting and the recriminations that have been going on for half a century and make it a clean wilderness. It should be a wilderness. It's one of the most beautiful-- the only wilderness of its kind in the United States proper.