Mr. MILLER. I think this is possible, although I do think in certain isolated places, places of great beauty, it is just as necessary to reserve some of these so that our children's children can see what the primitive part of this country looks like. I would like to see part of the deserts as well as the mountains and seashore areas retained in that way. I am not naive enough to believe that you can do this, in the purist sense, and properly achieve the goals of the program.

Mr. MORTON. Thank you very much. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. BARING. The gentleman from Alaska, Mr. Rivers?

Mr. RIVERS. I just wish to join in welcoming you here, Mr. Miller, and thank you for your testimony.

Mr. BARING. The gentleman from California?

Mr. JOHNSON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I would like to welcome my colleague here from the great city of Alameda who represents a good portion of Alameda County. I might say Congressman Miller is very familiar with the wilderness areas of California.

George, I want to say that the Secretary has just set aside three more areas adjacent to Yosemite, which should protect us there. One is the High Sierra Wilderness Area and two other smaller ones are wild areas. I do think the Secretary has moved very wisely in setting the areas aside. The High Sierra Primitive Area is now a wilderness area by action of the Secretary last week. I am sure that will relieve the pressure on those seeking wilderness in that area. California is expanding by leaps and bounds and there is pressure for development.

Mr. MILLER. The gentleman represents Yosemite Valley in the Congress and I am certain that he is familiar with it. But when you go onto the floor of the valley today it does not look very much like it did when you first went there, does it?

Mr. JOHNSON. Yes; the floor of the valley is very crowded. When the park has 25,000 or 30,000 people in it it looks like F Street down

town.

Mr. MILLER. May I tell you about the floor of the valley and what could happen? There was a very enthusiastic gentleman in Congress when I first came here who was then on the Public Roads Committee. He had been out to Yosemite, and there is a bill on record in the 79th Congress filed by him in which he provides for a highway to run through the Yosemite Valley, and he limits the gradient and limits the degree of curvature so that it would be comparable with the Pennsylvania Throughway. I cannot think of anything that would destroy Yosemite Valley more. Engineeringly it would be possible, but hardly feasible, and that would destroy the beauty of this place by putting a 4-lane highway down through the valley under the limitations that he provided for in his bill. We had a hard time talking him out of it.

Mr. JOHNSON. Most of the highway work within the park I think has been completed, and from the park boundaries down to Highway 395 on the east side of the Sierras is all under construction at the present time. I do believe that will be the last of the road work within the park. There was a lot of disagreement on the way the new road was constructed within the park, but I am sure those scars will heal and it will serve the park the way the public would like to have it today. The old road that went through that area of the park which

I knew as a child was not able to take the modern automobiles and the traffic of today. I think that will be the last of our road improvements. That is the highway going into the park by the pass and leaving the park on the east side. With this other wilderness area which has been set aside now by the action on the part of the Secretary of Agriculture, I am sure it will take care of the needs of wilderness in the Yosemite area.

That is all, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. BARING. The gentleman from Arizona?

Mr. UDALL. Mr. Chairman, I have been overwhelmed by my good friend from California and left speechless. We have had references to parts of the Vienna Woods, and Ferdinand and Isabella, and he has just overwhelmed me. I am glad he came.

Mr. BARING. The gentleman from Oregon?

Mr. DUNCAN. Nothing, except to thank you for your testimony and to comment on the gentleman from Maryland complimenting the State of California for their park system. I think with one single exception it is the best I have seen, and if you keep working on it you will have as high standards as Oregon.

Mr. MILLER. This challenge would be something we would be very happy to meet. Let's keep that spirit going in the West. You keep up with us if we get ahead of you.

Mr. BARING. The gentleman from Idaho, Mr. White?

Mr. WHITE. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I have the highest regard for the gentleman from California. He has been a real source of information and guidance to me since I have been here, one of the most friendly Members to a young Member I have met. I would like to ask him a couple of questions with reference to the extemporaneous statement he made, however.

First of all, something that bothers me, everyone that comes in to testify as a proponent of wilderness always cites that everything we have done in the past is bad, that every utilization of our land as we have expanded from the east coast to the west coast was improper, that the streams were improperly used, that the land was improperly used, and that the forests were improperly used. I am sure the gentleman realizes that in building this Government, the might of the United States, this would not have been possible without the exploitation of the resources we had and this is the only source of new wealth we have in the United States.

The only thing I think the gentleman means to say is that where it has been improperly exploited, where there were not set-asides, that this was incorrect. I think this should be made a part of the record.

Certainly we have to use our resources, but where they were misused, certainly no one can say that was correct. I am assuming the gentleman agrees with me.

Mr. MILLER. I cannot. There are two phases to this. One is that in the early days people had no concept of what was to come and they didn't worry-they took no care of the natural resources of this country.

Mr. WHITE. Now do you mean every person

Mr. MILLER. Just a minute. You asked a question and let me cite you some places.

Salmon used to run freely in some rivers in the east coast, Atlantic salmon, up through Connecticut, up through the Hudson. These were great areas for salmon. What destroyed them? Pollution of the streams. This pollution could have been avoided, just as it can be avoided today.

There are certain places where wastes are being put into streams today, killing the fish life in certain parts of the country, and yet in that same part of the country they are almost fighting with other States as to jurisdiction over fisheries. They are big commercial fisheries. We have destroyed a lot of our natural resources in this way. I am not criticizing the people today for this. I am not criticizing those who did it in the past. They did it through invincible ignorance. They had no knowledge of what they were doing, they did not do it deliberately they had to live.

But we have seen these things go down. We have seen our forests go down. We can destroy them, we can overcrop them.

At one time Maine was a great lumber-producing State. How much lumber does it produce today because cutting was not regulated? And yet in the West, as you know today, in Mr. Duncan's State, one of the biggest and perhaps most progressive lumber companies in the country has as its slogan "Lumber a Crop," and boasts that it plants three trees every time it takes one tree out.

In the South they have learned that you can sustain lumbering, and you can do it on a sustained basis by selective cutting, and not allowing people to cut where they want when the market is up and to forget it when it is down, and not taking care of their forests.

This is true of our range lands.

I remember during the war, when I represented more of an agricultural area than I do now, people came to me complaining that we were overgrazing some of the hills in Alameda County because the price of sheep was up and everybody wanted sheep.

We don't want to destroy it.

Mr. WHITE. I think we are in partial agreement. Mr. MILLER. We can live with it. We can take the values out of the land, out of the soil, but it must be done under some regulation or you are destroying the very lifeline.

This we have not learned with the sea as yet. Today we hunt the sea just as your forefathers and my forefathers hunted the lands. My grandfather crossed the land to California in 1848. They shot deer, they shot game, they wanted meat. This is where they got their meat.

I daresay Mr. Morton's family has been around here a long time. Once upon a time in this part of the country the pioneers lived off the land by shooting deer and other wildlife. How far would we get today if we had to depend on a meat supply of that nature? We must come to this with the sea as far as fisheries are concerned. We have to find new ways of reestablishing, replanting the sea, and this can be done. Some of the best oceanographers and fishery biologists tell us, if we could raise the temperature of the water in certain parts of the ocean by 2°, it would bring the nutrient to the surface, and that would allow us to crop the sea as we crop the land. Certainly the drift has been in the other direction rather than preservation or the establishing of regulations that allow us to use the land to its fullest without destroying it.

Mr. WHITE. I was very heartened by your answer to the gentleman from Maryland, Mr. Morton, a moment ago, as you have restated here

now.

Mr. MILLER. I mentioned regulation. You must regulate.
Mr. WHITE. Regulation is a necessary thing.

Again I will have to go back to what you just said about the deer in Maryland. Is it better to use the State of Maryland for the raising of deer or for the raising of a population of people that exist there today and use it for the purposes they now use it for?

Mr. MILLER. Oh, no.

Mr. WHITE. These two uses are not compatible, and you are going to have to decide what is the higher use and how to use it. Should we move all of the people out of Maryland and start raising deer?

Mr. MILLER. I was just saying this is the way the people in primitive days lived. This is what happened. No, I would not say you should move the people out of this area. I think, although you can raise very fine cattle here, you can raise and fatten cattle for beef in other parts of the country much better than you can do it here, and you can do it even in parts of my State of California. We are going to grow beautiful potatoes out in Idaho and beef out in the Midwest where we have the feed and the feed grain fatteners. And we are going to allot to each section of the country where it is on a more economical feeding level than this.

Mr. WHITE. I think we are in agreement. I think it is a cash regulation.

One other question I would like to ask you is, do you believe that the establishment of a wilderness system such as proposed will satisfy and take the load off the areas that you talked about as being as populated as F Street, Yosemite Park, and other parks? Will this legislation relieve that situation?

Mr. MILLER. I do not know that it is going to relieve that situation, but it is going to provide against the future when you will certainly require these lands, when transportation becomes more rapid, when people can visit them more cheaply than they do today.

I can tell you that in your own State you make quite a bit of money from sportsmen who go there to shoot and hunt, and this is pretty true all over the country. It is nothing for a sportsman to travel even up into Alaska; we have had to do some things to protect the game in Alaska from overkilling. You are going to have this same thing. People are going to go to these parts of the country. I have in mind one of the most beautiful beaches I have ever seen. It is on the island of Saipan. To tell you that people will go to Saipan today for this beach sounds rather foolish. But nobody had ever thought, when I was a boy, that people would go to Honolulu to enjoy its beauties, time and distance have disappeared.

This will help to preserve for the future some of the pristine values of the country we love so much.

Mr. WHITE. Most of the people in my State you are referring to come in automobiles and trailers, and they want to drive to an area where they can park and take the tote goat out of the back end of the pickup and take it into a mountainous area, strap the hind quarter of the elk onto the tote goat, and run it back down. There are very few of them, I assure you, that go in on foot to hunt 4 or 5 or 6 or 7

or 20 miles back. The majority of them want to shoot the deer or elk alongside the road, throw it in the pickup, and leave.

Mr. MILLER. And they will shoot them from the automobile if they can get away with it, too.

Mr. WHITE. This is the mass recreation pressure we have in the United States today. I have just returned from the wilderness hearings in the western part of the United States, and almost every person who appeared before that committee was not a conservationist in the true sense, or a true wilderness sponsor. There were a few of them, two or three, or maybe less than 1 percent. But the majority of them have a special use they are interested in. They are not really conservationists as they carry this banner down the street.

Mr. MILLER. I think that is true. If you and I wanted to argue
Mr. WHITE. I don't want to argue.

Mr. MILLER. We could talk about business and railroads doing the same thing. This is part of the selfishness of human nature. But there are the people who do want this, and these are the people who think this should be done for the protection of their children in the future.

Mr. BARING. The gentleman from North Dakota?

Mr. ANDREWS. No questions.

Mr. BARING. The gentleman from California?
Mr. BURTON of California. No questions.

Mr. BARING. Thank you very much, Mr. Miller.

Mr. MILLER. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, and members of the committee for bearing with me.

Mr. BARING. The next witness is our colleague from California, Mr. John F. Baldwin.

We are very happy to welcome you here this morning.

STATEMENT OF HON. JOHN F. BALDWIN, A REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA

Mr. BALDWIN. Mr. Chairman, I want to express my deepest appreciation for the opportunity to again appear before this committee in behalf of legislation to establish a National Wilderness Preservation System.

At the beginning of the 88th Congress I introduced a bill, H.R. 1023, which was identical to the wilderness bill which had been passed by the U.S. Senate in the 87th Congress. I would like to again express my support for H.R. 1023. However, it is my understanding that a basic policy question has been raised by some of the members of this committee as to whether Congress should have more positive power in the determinations required to create wilderness areas as compared to the executive branch of the Government. In order to resolve this basic policy question in a manner which would enhance the possiblities of favorable legislative action, it is my understanding that Congressman John Saylor of Pennsylvania, the ranking minority member of this committee, has introduced H.R. 9070.

H.R. 9070 would provide that Congress would be given the authority, by positive action in the form of legislation, to create wilderness areas, and to incorporate these areas as a part of the National Wilderness Preservation System. Under the Saylor bill, this would be done