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I'm Ken Salazar, the Secretary of the Interior.
It has been an exciting year in 2009, carrying out the direction by President Obama,
that we come in and change the Department of Interior for the better, to better serve the people of this country.
I'm proud of our people and the work that we have done in moving forward with creating a new energy frontier
and standing up renewable energy on our public lands and moving forward to tackle the challenges of climate change.
I am proud, as well, of the great work we've done in establishing a Great Outdoors America agenda.
Two million acres of wilderness, a thousand miles of wild and scenic rivers,
three national parks and many other major conservation priorities, such as the Everglades in Florida.
I'm proud we have moved forward with an agenda to make sure that we are respecting the two million Native Americans of the United States,
where we are moving forward with a program that recognizes and respects them and makes a change that has been a hundred years in coming.
This was a promise by President Obama. It's a promise that we are delivering on today.
I'm proud as well of the fact that we've opened up our doors to engage the young people of America like never before,
in our national parks, in our our wildlife refuges, our BLM lands and all across the board.
This year we had nearly 10,000 young people who worked with us here in the Department of Interior and next year,
the sky its the limit, relative to the number of young people who we will have working with us.
I'm also proud of the fact that we have brought in a new sense of responsibility and a higher sense of ethics for the Department of Interior.
We are the Department of America. We represent the people of this country from sea to shining sea,
from the Everglades to Yosemite, from Glacier National Park in Montana to the islands of Samoa and Guam and the *** Islands.
And everywhere that we go, I have been proud to work with the 70,000 men and women who make up the Department of the Interior,
carrying out the vision that President Obama has for the United States of America and for this Department.
It has been a good 2009 and we look forward to working with everybody as we continue to build on this foundation in the year 2010.