News Releases
Office of Governor Gary Locke
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - June 7, 2001
Contact:  Governor's Communications Office, 360-902-4136

Locke predicts new Audubon Center will develop environmental leaders

SEATTLE - Gov. Gary Locke today predicted the new Seward Park Audubon Center will plant the seeds to grow future environmental leaders.

Locke attended the signing of a memorandum of understanding by Seattle Parks and the Audubon Society which makes the park's annex building available to Audubon for use as an environmental education center. It will be called the Seward Park Audubon Center.

"This center foreshadows the future of environmental education -- a future we can only imagine," Locke said.

He argued young people cannot develop a visceral connection to the natural world simply by reading books.

"They must experience it first-hand," the governor said.

The Seward Park Audubon Center will help young people learn from the land, including one of the last stands of old-growth conifers in Seattle.

Locke cited examples of others who learned first-hand about the natural world and the differences they made.

"Just imagine if Ralph Munro, our former Republican Secretary of State, hadn't witnessed the brutal capture of an Orca in Puget Sound in the early 1970s. We still might have Orca captures in Puget Sound today," Locke said.

Quoting novelist Wallace Stegner, Locke added, "Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or into extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clear streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence, so that never again will Americans be free in their own country from the noise, exhausts, the stinks of human and automotive wastes."

"Future generations who learn at this center and from this park won't let it happen," Locke predicted.

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