Subscribe to one of our news e-mail lists . Bill Clinton has always had a problem with time. Clinton bounded off through the sequoias, fascinated by the 300-ft. He returned, behind schedule, to make his designation speech before zipping off by helicopter to a fund raiser in southern California.
Nature operates on a less hurried time scale.
Some of the sequoias Clinton preserved in the 328,000-acre monument are only the third generation since the last Ice Age, part of a family of trees that has endured fires, earthquakes, storms and every change of political leadership since human history began. Sequoias themselves are too brittle for timber yards, but if trees all around them are logged, their shallow roots often fail to hold them in the ground. As time runs out for his presidency, Clinton is desperate to leave an environmental legacy that will not be swept away like last year's leaves. Just last week he decreed the preservation of 84 million acres of coral reefs in Hawaii, his EPA ordered the long-delayed dredging of chemical waste from the Hudson River, and he started a new effort to salvage the Kyoto treaty to fight global warming after negotiations broke down in the Hague last month. With a flurry of pronouncements this year, he has locked away from loggers and developers more public land in the lower 48 states than any other President.