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Skriven 2007-08-27 23:30:44 av Whitehouse Press (1:3634/12.0)
Ärende: Press Release (0708275) for Mon, 2007 Aug 27
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Remarks by the First Lady at a Junior Ranger Event
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For Immediate Release August 27, 2007

Remarks by the First Lady at a Junior Ranger Event Craig Thomas Discovery
and Visitors Center Grand Teton National Park Moose, Wyoming



2:15 P.M. MDT

MRS. BUSH: Thank you all. Thank you very much. Thanks, everyone. Thanks for
coming out today. Thanks so much, and thank you, Mary. Mary Bomar, as all
of you know, is the Director of the National Park Service, and she's done a
really terrific job, including working with Secretary Kempthorne, someone
from Idaho, who now is the Secretary of the Interior, and who's very, very
aware of the specific treasures we have in the western part of the United
States and our national parks, but also the treasures everywhere across our
country that represent the very best, both of our most beautiful natural
landscapes like Grand Teton, and our most important historical sites like
the White House and many other of our national parks that are historical
sites.

Mary and Secretary Kempthorne have been working very diligently on this
idea of the Centennial Challenge, which is the challenge to our Congress,
as well as to the American people, for the ten years leading up to the
centennial of the National Park Service in 2016.

This is a challenge to try to really both get a lot of appropriations from
Congress, as well as partner with the private sector to try to address
many, many of the challenges that our national parks face, so that at that
centennial in 2016, our national parks will be perfectly preserved and
pristine, we'll be able to do a lot of the restoration that we want to do,
both wetlands restoration as well as watershed restoration and basic plant
elimination, restoration of native plants all over the country in a lot of
our natural national parks. And then, of course, the preservation of our
famous and fabulous historical sites, as well.

Mary Bomar, I want to thank you so much for working so hard on this
challenge. I want to also thank Senator John Barrosso that's here with us.
Both the Senate and the Congress will be hearing from a lot of the people
from Interior and the national parks as we try to get this centennial park
challenge passed through Congress.

I want to thank all the board members here from the Grand Teton
Association. Thank you for what you do for this specific park. And then, of
course, all of the people from the National Park Foundation board who
happen to also be in town, and have worked so hard with every single park
and are the philanthropic partners of each of the separate parks'
associations.

Thank you all very much for joining me today, and a special thanks to the
Junior Rangers and to their parents, who brought them here to the park.
Thank you all for coming out today.

Mary, thank you so much. It's great to meet our superintendents. I've had
the chance to get to know park rangers all over the country, and our park
rangers are so terrific. What they do for us, as Americans, and for our
beautiful sites is very, very important. It's a job I want to encourage
young people to think about. I'm not sure

people really consider being park rangers anymore, and we're desperate to
have great people working in our parks. So I hope that some of these Junior
Rangers will grow up and become real park rangers. And I hope -- that's one
of the good messages of the Junior Ranger program.

All of us can remember the first time we were amazed by a national park. My
closest national park, when I was growing up in Midland, was Carlsbad
Caverns, New Mexico. That was the park my mother, as my Girl Scout leader,
and George's mother, as his Cub Scout leader drove the scout troops to, and
we would visit the Carlsbad Caverns. That was my very first park that I
remember the most. And then since then, I've had the opportunity to visit
many, many of our parks. And in fact, as Mary said, I live in one -- the
White House -- which you may not realize, but is considered -- the White
House grounds are a national park site.

This last May, Regan and our friends that we grew up together, that we hike
with every year, hiked in Zion. We've hiked in Yellowstone and Glacier and
Yosemite and Olympic National Park in Washington and Denali in Alaska. And
-- and this is the first time this has actually been announced, this is a
press scoop -- Jenna Bush was proposed to in Acadia National Park.
(Applause.) So the national parks have been a very important part of our
family life, as well.

There's no better way to experience our country, I think, than to visit our
national parks, our diverse and huge varied group of national parks that we
have, and also it's a great way to introduce young people to being outside.

Just like Mary Bomar said, we worry that young people are spending too much
time in front of the computer and the television and the video games when
we want all American young people to breathe fresh air, to take advantage
of the most magnificent natural landscapes in the world. That's certainly
what this one is behind us, and many, many of our parks are.

Our national parks offer children a healthy alternative to being out -- for
their free time. The Jefferson Memorial, even in an urban setting, is, of
course, also outside, and even children who live in cities have the
opportunity to experience many of our urban national parks like
Independence Hall in Philadelphia, the Martin Luther King Historic Site in
Atlanta, and many others that are in urban areas -- the Missions, for
instance, in San Antonio.

Here in Wyoming, the parks introduce young people both to the natural
world, and to their history, the history of their own state. Children can
visit Devil's Tower, which is a monolith of igneous rock, and America's
first national monument. Children can explore Yellowstone, which is a World
Heritage Site; certainly one of the most well known parks in the world,
known for its geysers and canyons and fabulous meadows. Children here can
go back to the prehistoric era at Fossil Butte National Monument, where the
remains of fish and insects, snails, turtles, birds, bats and plants are
preserved in 50-million-year-old layers of rock. Young people can discover
the stories of their ancestors, the American pioneers, who migrated west

along the Oregon Trail at the Fort Laramie National Area.

One of the most fabulous national parks in Wyoming and in the United States
is the one we're in right now, the Grand Teton. Home to some of the most
awe-inspiring landscapes in the world, this park is known for its
magnificent mountain range, its pristine lakes, and its

sagebrush-covered valley. Every year, more than 4 million people come to
Grand Teton to hike here in this park's mountain trails, to raft the Snake
River, to spot the wildlife hiding in the Grand Teton peaks and forests,
from the black bear to the red squirrel to the yellow-bellied marmot.

Now we can all learn more about this park at this fabulous new visitors
center named for the late Senator Craig Thomas, who was a proud Wyomingite,
and a very, very strong advocate in the United States government for our
national parks -- also a very close friend of mine and President Bush, and
we miss him.

The Craig Thomas Discovery and Visitors Center was made possible by a
partnership between the National Park Service, the Grand Teton National
Park Foundation, and the Grand Teton Association. This innovative exhibit,
which I just got the tour of, especially with the new interactive video
displays, will be a really wonderful resource for people who are coming
here, both to learn more before they go out into the park, or, in many
cases, as we all know, people aren't able to go out into the park, but they
can come to the visitors center and learn a lot about it, a lot about all
of the -- both the biology and zoology of this park.

Thanks to this center's really terrific space and architecture and
state-of-the-art technology, visitors can now learn everything about the
Grand Teton's spectacular resources. Rangers say that just in the couple of
weeks that the center has been open, many, many more visitors have come to
Grand Teton. They say they haven't actually

kept a count, but they can tell by the cars in the parking lot. (Laughter.)

Of course, one of the things that's great about this, about this new
center, is that it gives such a good location for the Junior Rangers to do
all of their activities. And that's really what we're here today to talk
about, and that is these programs that attract young

people all over our country; ways we can make sure that all young Americans
are educated not only about our national parks and our national historic
sites and all of our wonderful resources, but also about their specific
responsibility to be stewards of our country and

all of the sites and the ways we want them to grow up, the values that we
want them to have to grow up and take care of our country when they're the
adults in charge.

So I'm so excited to be here with this program. As Mary Bomar said, the
Junior Ranger program reaches nearly 400,000 children and their families
every year in the United States. We also have an online Web Ranger program.
Web Rangers, these are children who can't get into a park but can get into
every park on the web and learn about them. The Web Rangers were launched
in August 2005, and the site has already had more than 4 million visitors,
including from 86 countries around the world.

The best part of the Junior Ranger program, though, is that whole families
can come together. It's a wonderful family opportunity to visit our
national parks. And certainly for the President and me, our memories, our
early memories of visiting national parks included our

parents, and now I'm happy to say that our children's early memories --
except for this most recent one of Jenna's -- also included her parents.
(Laughter.)

So we're so thrilled to be here with everyone here. I want to thank all of
you. I want to thank the big park service. Mary, thank you, the
superintendent; all the park rangers here at Grand Teton and at all the
other parks here in Wyoming and Idaho. Thank you for everything you do and
the way you take care of our pristine beautiful

sites, and our country, and all of our visitors. Thank you so much for
that. Thank you for dedicating your life to that, to all of the rangers,
especially, for that.

And now, I think we're ready for the Junior Ranger swear-in. Are you all
ready?

Thanks, everybody. (Applause.)

END 2:27 P.M. MDT
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