President Barack Obama's signing of the Omnibus Public Lands Bill designated 86 new Wild & Scenic Rivers in 2009.  We take a look back at this landmark action.

The second largest Wild & Scenic Rivers package in history received President Obama's signautre on March 30th of last year, After receiving the vote of the House of Representatives, the Senate and finally the President himself, the Omnibus Public Lands Bill created 86 new Wild and Scenic Rivers and provided protection for well over 350,000 acres of public lands.

Since the signing of the National Wild and Scenic Rivers Act in 1968,  166 rivers had received Wild and Scenic status by the start of last year. The landmark March bill increased that number by more than 50 per cent. While the increase in number of miles protected wasn't as dramatic—the bill added 1,100 miles of river to the  more than 11,000 miles already shielded under the Act—it was still a remarkable vicotry for river conservation.

Wild and Scenic River designation protects riverside land along both sides of a river corridor, blocks dams and other harmful water projects and preserves a river’s free-flowing nature.

New Wild & Scenic Rivers were designated in Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming, Utah, Arizona, California and Massachusetts. A complete listing is available at American Rivers.

Rebecca Wodder, President of American Rivers, proclaimed the bill as “one of the largest environmental protection measures in decades,” adding that local kayakers, rafters, hikers, anglers and hunters were integral in pushing for historic protections "from the Snake River headwaters in Wyoming to the desert Southwest’s Fossil Creek, to the trout streams of the Rockies, and the popular fishing and paddling streams of the Pacific Northwest."

STATEMENT BY THE PRESIDENT

Today I have signed into law H.R. 146, the "Omnibus Public Land Management Act of 2009." This landmark bill will protect millions of acres of Federal land as wilderness, protect more than 1,000 miles of rivers through the National Wild and Scenic River System, and designate thousands of miles of trails for the National Trails System. It also will authorize the 26 million-acre National Landscape Conservation System within the Department of the Interior.

Among other provisions, H.R. 146 designates three new units in our National Park System, enlarges the boundaries of several existing parks, and designates a number of National Heritage Areas. It creates a new national monument -- the PrehistoricTrackwaysNational Monument -- and four new national conservation areas, and establishes the Wyoming Range Withdrawal Area. It establishes a collaborative landscape-scale restoration program with a goal of reducing the risk of wildfire and authorizes programs to study and research the effects of climate change on natural resources and other research-related activities.

Treasured places from coast to coast will benefit from H.R. 146, including Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore in Michigan; Monongahela National Forest in West Virginia; Oregon's Mount Hood; Idaho's Owyhee Canyons; the Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado; Zion National Park in Utah; remarkable landscapes in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California; and wilderness-quality National Forest lands in Virginia and public lands in New Mexico.

This bipartisan bill has been many years in the making, and is one of the most important pieces of natural resource legislation in decades.

BARACK OBAMA

THE WHITE HOUSE

March 30, 2009