Yellowstone National park is America's holy ground

By Hillary Rodham Clinton

This week, Americans celebrate the 125th anniversary of Yellowstone National Park.

Of course, Yellowstone's stunning geysers, majestic vistas and spectacular wildlife have been around a little longer than that. The trail Bill, Chelsea and I hiked along when we visited the park last summer is on a mountain that's about 50 million years old. The bubbling mud pots we saw are fueled by heat vents from ancient volcanic activity.

But when you think about it, that's the point. As Vice President Gore said at a celebration of Yellowstone's birthday on Sunday the park "is in many ways America's holy ground -- a place not only of recreation but of creation, as well -- bringing us face to face with the grandeur of God's works."

So, this week we celebrate not just God's creation but our commitment to honoring and being good stewards of it.

We also celebrate a uniquely American idea. The United States was the first country in the world to create a national park. And Yellowstone was that park. With Yellowstone, we made clear that our land was a national treasure to be passed from generation to generation.

It all started on a September night in 1870. Members of the Washburn expedition, which was exploring the Yellowstone region in Wyoming Territory, were sitting around a campfire. As the story goes (and there is some debate about it), the talk initially was of how the land could be used for financial benefit. But then, a member of the party, Cornelius Hedges, argued that Yellowstone's landscape was too precious to be exploited. Its rare beauty belonged not to an individual or to a private enterprise but to the nation. Eventually, the rest of the crowd around the campfire agreed. In 1872, President Ulysses S. Grant signed legislation turning Yellowstone into a park.

Today, 125 years later, Yellowstone remains the crown jewel of our park system. It is home to the world's biggest concentration of geo-thermal geysers, including "Old Faithful." The park holds great herds of elk and bison -- among them the only wild buffalo herd in the world to have survived continuously since primitive times. In fact, Yellowstone is one of the few places in the lower 43 states where the plant and animal life remains much as it did before Christopher Columbus set foot in the Americas.

Yellowstone may have been our first national park, but thankfully, it was not our last. Today, the park system is made up of 375 sites. They range from places of great beauty (like Grand Teton and Yosemite) to places of historical and symbolic importance (like President Lincoln's home and the Statue of Liberty) to places where a family can just go for a walk on a warm summer afternoon (like the park my husband grew up near in Hot Springs, Ark.).

Our national parks are the envy of the world, and that's why people come from thousands of miles away to visit them. But they are also at risk. A Park Service budget that has failed to keep pace with inflation and rising costs combined with increasing numbers of visitors -- 265 million in 1996 -- has put tremendous stress on the parks. That means closed campgrounds and museums, trails and roads that have not been maintained, and too few rangers on duty in the forests and at the information centers.

Even before our family went on vacation in Yellowstone, Bill was determined to do what he could to protect and preserve millions of acres of treasured national parklands, from the Arctic Refuge to the Florida Everglades.

In addition to increasing the Park Service budget and establishing new user fees to help raise park revenues, the President has fought to shield Yellowstone and other parks from the harmful effects of mining. This week, 22,000 acres of America's public forest land near Yellowstone were withdrawn from mining claims that could have threatened vast stretches of the park.

While this is a step in the right direction, much more remains to be done. Last year, Chelsea and I stood with Bill in one of Yellowstone's pristine meadows as he announced an agreement among environmentalists, business leaders and government officials to protect some of the park's most scenic landscape from the proposed New World mine located just outside the park. As part of the balanced budget agreement, funds were earmarked to meet the federal government's end of the New World deal. now, it's up to Congress to appropriate the money and make it happen.

Our parks aren't preserved once; they're preserved every day. Yellowstone's birthday celebration is a call to Americans to rededicate ourselves to the vision that grew out of that campfire 125 years ago. Progress, after all, need not always be defined as a frontier conquered. Sometimes, progress is a frontier preserved.

-- Creators Syndicate