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Speakers highlight Dan Evans' conservation legacy and role in naming of wilderness
Summary
At Daniel J. Evans' memorial, speakers credited him with major conservation achievements—protecting millions of acres and helping spur a statewide program that has helped leverage roughly $2 billion for parks, trails and wildlife habitat; they cited Senate Bill S2038 renaming Olympic Wilderness in his honor.
Speakers at the memorial for former Gov. Daniel J. Evans emphasized his conservation record and long-term impact on state land protection.
Sally Jewell, introduced in the program as associated with REI and noted for having served as U.S. secretary of the interior, summarized several elements of Evans' environmental legacy: she said Evans helped protect about 2,500,000 acres of wilderness in Washington, described the creation of the Washington Wildlife and Recreation Coalition and the state program it supports, and said that since 1989 the coalition's efforts have leveraged "over $2,000,000,000 in state, local, and private investments" for roughly 1,700 parks, trails, wildlife habitat and working lands. Jewell also noted that the Olympic Wilderness was renamed the Daniel J. Evans Wilderness when Senate Bill S2038 was signed into law in December 2016, which she cited as a substantive, lasting recognition of his conservation work.
Other speakers reinforced the conservation theme by urging attendees to enjoy and protect places Evans fought to preserve. The memorial program repeatedly returned to the Evans family's ties to the outdoors—hiking, scouting and longstanding advocacy for preserving wild lands—as part of how speakers said Evans connected personal values to public policy.
The transcript records these figures and the S2038 reference as speaker statements. Reporters should confirm the exact acreage totals, the $2 billion figure and the formal citation and text of S2038 in public records for precise reporting; in the transcript those numbers are presented as speaker assertions rather than as accompanying legislative excerpts.
