Wayne Gilchrest: “I want to quickly make a comment in reference to the gentleman from Montana (Mr. Rehberg) and praise him for all his…”

“I want to quickly make a comment in reference to the gentleman from Montana (Mr. Rehberg) and praise him for all his efforts to deal with this issue I think in a very comprehensive, competent way. I come to the floor on this issue from a slightly different perspective. I am from Maryland, not from out West. I have lived and worked in the Rocky Mountains. I have ridden snowmobiles in National Forest in the Rocky Mountains. I have had some experience in the wintertime in pretty cold places, spent the winter of 1966 in a tent 250 miles north of the Arctic Circle in Norwood, a number of experiences. But what I want to do is make a comparison between the Chesapeake Bay and Yellowstone Park. The Chesapeake Bay is a beautiful estuary. We are working hard to restore it. But the Chesapeake Bay in some sense like Yellowstone is being loved to death by too many people. In the Chesapeake Bay, it is not snowmobiles. It is motorboats. In the Chesapeake, if we want to bring back the oysters, which are 99 percent less than what they were 100 years ago; if we want to bring the crabs, which are 50 percent of what they were 50 years ago; if we want to bring back the rockfish, they need certain areas to spawn, they need certain areas to survive.”