Editors: Digital photos of Manuel Lujan Jr. are available by e-mailing caughey@colorado.edu or calling (303) 492-4007.
Manuel Lujan Jr., the former secretary of the interior under President George H. W. Bush who faced one of the nation's worst environmental disasters, the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, will speak at the University of Colorado at Boulder on March 17.
Lujan will speak at 7 p.m. in the Old Main Chapel in a conversation with CU-Boulder history and environmental studies Professor Patricia Limerick and distinguished law Professor Charles Wilkinson.
The talk is free and open to the public. Lujan's talk is part of the 2003-04 Wren and Tim Wirth Forum on the American West, which is bringing five former secretaries of the interior, and current Secretary Gale Norton, to campus to discuss their roles in shaping the West.
The series is sponsored by the CU-Boulder Center of the American West, The Nature Conservancy and the Denver law firms of Brownstein, Hyatt and Farber, and McKenna, Long and Aldridge.
During his time in office from 1989 to 1993, Lujan helped implement President Bush's "no net loss of wetlands" goal through actions to enlarge Everglades National Park in Florida and by supporting passage of the North American Wetlands Conservation Act. His emphasis was on the idea that the nation could have both the resource development needed for economic security and environmental protection to
ensure quality of life.
A native of New Mexico, Lujan served in the U.S. House of Representatives for 20 years and was the state's longest serving Republican congressman before he retired from Congress in 1989. He currently sits on the boards of numerous companies in the banking, construction, electric, gas, insurance and telecommunications industries, and runs Manuel Lujan Associates, a consulting firm dealing with matters involving federal agencies.
For more information on the lecture series, contact the Center of the American West at (303) 492-4879 or http://www.centerwest.org/, or The Nature Conservancy at (303) 444-2950 ext. 1606 or http://www.nature.org/colorado.
