I grew up in the West, grew up on the land, was educated as a geologist.

What I finally did in 1995 was I said, I'm going to get out of this town and I'm going to go out West.

Well, what I tried to do is simply to get out on the land. And when I came to Washington, I think one of the mistakes we made early on was kind of having an ideological dispute up in the Congress.

Protecting all this land, working with the President to establish all these monuments, to, you know... I think the President has a land protection record that's second to no one in this century, maybe Teddy Roosevelt.

I'm going to go out and get everybody together and say I think we ought to protect this for generations to come. Now, let's get down to work and walk the land and talk about the conflicts and get everybody involved.

We've set aside tens of millions of acres of those northwestern forests for perpetuity. The unemployment rate has gone not up, but down. The economy has gone up.