Orrin Hatch Quotes

Attention! Land Thieves and Natural Resources Grabbers …. Under [Theodore] Roosevelt any doubt about the power of the Chief Executive to make withdrawals of public land was resolved in favor of the people.

Politicians wanted to mine the Grand Canyon for zinc and copper, and Theodore Roosevelt said, 'No.'

For a variety of reasons, I believe, the time is right to resolve many of the long standing and thorny land use, recreation, and wilderness designation issues in Central Idaho.

Wilderness, like the national park system, was an American idea.

Some environmentalists have had the feeling that Indians are not good stewards. I've always been critical of that.

Utah today remains a battleground for land-use policies.

Our responsibility for BLM lands is multiple-use, meaning a variety of needs and uses.

In the hierarchy of public lands, national parks by law have been above the rest: America's most special places, where natural beauty and all its attendant pleasures - quiet waters, the scents of fir and balsam, the hoot of an owl, and the dark of a night sky unsullied by city lights - are sacrosanct.

Conflicting legislation and regulations, overlapping mandates, unwillingness to enforce land use, elite capture, entrenched attitudes, and lack of incentives to influence behavior are rife in many resource-rich countries.

To waste, to destroy, our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the land instead of using it so as to increase its usefulness, will result in undermining in the days of our children the very prosperity which we ought by right to hand down to them amplified and developed.

We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect

Whose voice was first sounded on this land? The voice of the red people who had but bows and arrows... When the white man comes in my country he leaves a trail of blood behind him... I have two mountains in that country... I want the Great Father to make no roads through them.

Some Western states have collaborative water agreements with Indian tribes - Washington state, for instance, monitors a number of its rivers to protect spawning salmon, which are promised to native peoples under 19th-century treaties.

I love creating hideaways. My idea is to go to the most beautiful, unspoilt places, buy the land, and make sure it is never damaged. I've always admired John D. Rockefeller, who bought up tracts of land to ensure they were left wild in perpetuity.

Landowners, farmers and gamekeepers, though they comprise a small minority of the rural population, claim to speak for everyone, and dismiss those who challenge them as interfering urbanites.

With regards to the Blackfoot Clearwater Stewardship Act, I believe it lacks a balanced approach. It designates 79,000 acres as new wilderness while only opening up 6,000 acres for recreation.

When more land is locked up by the federal government, real people suffer, and opportunities for future prosperity are reduced.

How much wilderness do the wilderness-lovers want? ask those who would mine and dig and cut and dam in such sanctuary spots as these. The answer is easy: Enough so that there will be in the years ahead a little relief, a little quiet, a little relaxation, for any of our increasing millions who need and want it.

If wilderness is outlawed, only outlaws can save wilderness.

Wilderness is a resource which can shrink but not grow. Invasions can be arrested or modified in a manner to keep an area usable either for recreation, science or for wildlife, but the creation of new wilderness in the full sense of the word is impossible. It follows, then, that any wilderness program is a rearguard action, through which retreats are reduced to a minimum.

I come more and more to the conclusion that wilderness, in America or anywhere else, is the only thing left that is worth saving.

There is no more honorable thing any of us can do with our lives than to work to put part of the world off-limits to the activities of human beings.

Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed ... We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in.

An important measure of our true commitment to environmental quality is our dedication to protecting the wilderness and its inhabitants. We must recognize their ecological significance and preserve them as sources of inspiration and education. And we need them as places of quiet refuge and reflection.

Our language, one of our most precious natural resources, deserves at least as much protection as our woodlands, streams and whooping cranes.