ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, August 13, 1996 TAG: 9608130084
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-3 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK, WYO.
SOURCE: New York Times
Declaring that ``Yellowstone is more precious than gold,'' President Clinton came to a pristine corner of the country's oldest national park Monday to announce a halt to development of a nearby gold mine that environmentalists had warned would damage the park's waterways and wildlife.
With pine-covered Baronette Peak rising behind him, Clinton announced an agreement in principle with the Canadian owners of the New World Mine in which the government will swap $65 million worth of federal land in exchange for the company's dropping its claim to some $650 million worth of gold deposits upstream from the park's northeastern corner in Montana. The land to be swapped has not been specified.
``Yellowstone was entrusted into our care as a people, a whole people, more than 120 years ago now,'' Clinton told an audience that included singer John Denver and Sen. John Rockefeller, D-W.Va., whose family gave the federal government much of the land that forms Grand Teton National Park just south of here.
``And today we are saying to the rest of the world, to the rest of the country and to future generations of America, we have been worthy of that trust and we are giving it on to our children and our children's children.''
The proposed mine has been controversial for years, and Clinton first expressed his concern about it on his vacation here last year, when he flew over the site by helicopter. In the months since, his administration undertook intensive negotiations with the mine owners and environmental groups that have sued to block its development, producing the swap agreement announced Monday.
On the opening day of the Republican National Convention, Clinton used the announcement to trumpet one of his best-selling political themes: that the environment and public health and safety can be protected without unduly burdening business - and that Democrats are the best ones to do the protecting.
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