President's Environmental Youth Awards Remarks on Presenting the Awards

THE PRESIDENT. Hello, everybody. Doug Costle ¹ is testifying and is on the way over here, but Barbara Blum and others are present who can represent the Environmental Protection Agency very well.

¹ Administrator, Environmental Protection Agency.

As President I want to say how grateful I am to all of you for coming, and particularly for the young people who will win the awards. One of the gratifying things about this program is that over 200,000 young Americans have been given awards for outstanding work in protecting the quality of life of American people.

Their projects pay rich dividends as they are conducted and concluded, but they also lay a groundwork for advanced scientists, for Members of Congress, my own administration, and Presidents to see how we can, through these processes, have a better way of preserving our precious heritage and environmental quality.

There's another aspect, I think, that's equally important for now and the future. When a 3-year-old American or an 18-year-old American or anyone in between takes on a project, sometimes they can add a sense of innovation and a freshness of thought that a more senior American would never contribute. And they lay the groundwork for themselves, in their own lives, to continue this work in years ahead.

I've read down the list of awards and seen the diversity of projects that have been concluded. Some of them are quite exciting and quite productive already.

And at this time Barbara Blum will read the citations, the awards will be given out, and I'd like to congratulate each one of the recipients of the awards personally.

Barbara?

MS. BLUM. Thank you, Mr. President. I'd just like to echo what Jimmy Carter has said. It's been a great pleasure to work with the youth of this country in his Environmental Youth program and to bring people into the environmental movement and into caring that have never been there before to care and are just beginning to be our future.

Mr. President, today we have four young men who represent the Cub Scout Pack 981 in Annapolis, Maryland. For several weeks they studied aquatic life in marshes in the Chesapeake Bay area-one of the most important areas of our country—and they culminated their studies by doing something pretty creative: They floated popcorn on the water and then followed the popcorn as if it were an oil spill to see the movement of the waters. I think that was very creative.

[At this point, Ms. Blum, Deputy Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, introduced Scott M. Laurie, Christopher R. Petchler, Kevin E. Kovelant, and John Woerner to the President, who presented each with an award.]

Next we have something else pretty special—everybody's really pretty special today—but we have three young men from Cincinnati, Ohio, who, as part of the Civil Air Patrol—and they represent a group of children who, with their own money, took courses in radiation monitoring. There is a nuclear facility that's about to open in their area, and now they're going to be prepared in case of an emergency to do monitoring, both air and water.

[Ms. Blum introduced Robert H. Green and Lizbeth A. and Anthony .J. Etienne to the President, who presented each with an award.]

Mr. President, this next young woman that we have here today was selected by her very own classmates at Rosemead High School. She is representing them today. Their class made four movies. They made movies on energy, on the environment, on pollution problems. They were the actors, they were the scriptwriters, they were the producers, and they were the distributors of this. They showed the films to civic groups and other schools, and they have made quite a contribution there in educating other people their age and older.

[Ms. Blum introduced Mary Jane Roddy to the President, who presented her with an award.]

Mr. President, next we have some high school students from Lakeland, Florida. They've done something pretty special too. They tested the water quality in the lakes around Lakeland—and we who are from the South know how many there are there—in order to determine, for the area development commission, the quality of the water and the wildlife that was present in the area. And as such, they've done as much for clean drinking water for Florida as any adults ever have in the history of the State.

[Ms. Blum introduced James F. Skinner, Cindi Parker, and Randolph L. Barber to the President, who presented each with an award.]

Mr. President, next we have two campers, summer campers, from the National Wildlife Federation Camp. They spent the whole summer session studying the open areas, studying the woodlands, mapping, compassing, and they also studied the interdependence of animals in the meadows and the forest habitats. And doing this, and through their camping experiences, they have been provided a real understanding, that they're sharing with their classmates now, on how the natural environment affects the social and historical environments, too.

[Ms. Blum introduced Kimberly Shafer and Nathan Liepold to the President, who presented each with an award.]

And next, as you can well see, we have a Cub Scout, an Explorer Scout, and a Boy Scout. They're representing a coming together of your youth program, Mr. President, and the Boy Scouts of America. There will be 500 young men and women who are going to be participating in promoting energy conservation, at your request and call for energy conservation-5 million within the next year. And these young people are representative of those 5 million people.

[Ms. Blum introduced Michael Birlew, Kevin Ward, and Tana Landgraf to the President. who presented each with an award.]

THE PRESIDENT. I think the entire audience and the news media can see the contributions that these young people have already made and the wide difference among their projects. They've taken this as an initiative on their own, some acting as individuals, some acting as part of very fine organizations, some at summer camps, some within their own home community, some in the ocean, some in the woods, some in the South, some in the North. And they are representative of literally tens of thousands of young people who participated in this youth environment project to make sure that Americans at their age and of all ages know how important it is to preserve the quality of life for our people.

And on behalf of our Nation, I'd like to again express my deep thanks to them, individually and collectively, and also to express my thanks for all those tens of thousands that they represent by coming here to the White House to receive these awards. Thank you very much for being here. I'm very proud of what these young people have done and what they mean to us now and in the future.

Thank you again, everybody. Now go home and go back to work.