pressing need for their use. This is not idle speculation either. The 

 majestic backhills of South Dakota are already the target of uranium mining 

 operations that 'could poison the region and end it as one of the top 

 centers of tourism in this country. One of the greatest elk hunting areas 

 of the Northwest and certainly one of the country's most beautiful 

 regjBfis- -often called little Switzerland, Walla Walla County in northeastern 

 Oregon--is now trying to figure out how to cope with the huge lignite 

 strip mine and possible mine mouth power plant proposed by Utah 

 International that would devastate the beauty, hunting and other 

 recreational assets of the region. 



My point here is that throughout the West dozens of majestic natural 

 wonderlands, like part of Montana's Sarpy Creek country, are already over 

 the hill on the drawing boards for intensive industrialization. Gone. 

 Scores of more are in the process of going. And hundres more from the 

 Canadian border to the Mexican border, plains, valleys, holes, canyons, 

 bottom lands, mountain slopes, mountain tops, rivers, desert flats and 

 desert lakes will be going. I don't have to remind you of the plans for 

 the MX missile sites across a good part of Utah and Nevada. 



My third and final point deals with protection. It is my opinion, and 

 I am sure that most of you share it, that our nation is in danger. That we 

 must try to achieve energy independence and that the rush to use the 

 resources of the West cannot be turned aside at this stage in our history. 

 It would seem that the goal we will all have to try to achieve is to 

 maximize the protections and minimize degradation and despoliation. The 

 question of how to do this should be uppermost in the various conferences 

 and deliberations such as this one, that come to grips with what is going 

 on and what is yet to come. One can say "Let us deal with each new 

 intrusion on a case-by-case basis, examining what it will do, what adverse 

 impacts it will have, and then decide how to maximize protections and 

 minimize the harmful affects of each one." There are pluses and minuses 

 in this approach but the chief danger, seems to me, would be one that has 

 the tendency to overlook accumulative affects of one project and then 

 another, and then another and so on. 



The Four Corners country of the southwest is a vivid example of 

 how, by one step at a time, a whole region is at last awakened to the fact 

 that it has been overwhelmed by the industrialized pollution of a series of 

 energy related developments. Little by little everything had been 

 changing, including its air and its way of life and now it can't go back. 

 In all honesty I do not choose to look at what is occurring as a case of 

 heros and villains, but in the case of each proposed development conflict 

 inevitability ensues and until trade-offs and compromises are mutually 

 agreed upon, until protections are maximized and adverse impacts 

 minimized, there are bound to be the good guys and the bad. 



Agencies of both the federal and the respective state governments can 

 be among the good guys, working responsibly and responsively to limit 

 damaging change, but often they do not do so. Even when state laws 

 provide protections we have seen state agencies crippled by lack of funds 

 and personnel, lack of effective enforcement procedures, lack of will or 

 worse. Policy itself differs from state to state. Some of them positively 



