Jim Range, who played a key role in both enforcing the Clean Water Act and ensuring it wasn't repealed, has died at age 63.

Range was a wonderfully colorful speaker whom we interviewed at length for "Paving Paradise." He is a crucial, if largely unheralded, figure in the history of wetlands protection.

Range helped to prosecute some of the earliest dredge-and-fill cases after the act first passed. An avid outdoorsman, Range could see the damage that developers were doing to a fragile environment, and was glad to have a tool to stop them.

"I was quite interested in the fact that they were ripping the devil out of the Keys," Range told us.

Later, when he was working for Tennessee Sen. Howard Baker, he made sure wetlands protection stayed a part of the law when it was renewed in 1977. Later, when Reagan Administration conservatives targeted wetlands permitting for repeal, Range told them that as long as Baker was in the Senate, they could forget it.

"They knew that nothing on wetlands was going to move through the U.S. Senate," Range told us. "I delivered that message to the White House."