Healthy Forests

Below are excerpts from Senator Harkin's speech on the Senate floor yesterday, and my comments.

Mr. HARKIN. I am somewhat amazed when we come out with legislation and it deals with sensitive environmental issues and we are told certain environmental groups have concerns and we will hear about the environmental issues so that somehow, if you are a member of an environmental organization, you are opposed to progress, you are opposed to jobs, you are opposed to doing things that might make life better for some people in certain areas. It is almost as if "environmentalist" is a bad word. I don't think it is. I think being pro-environment and being an environmentalist is a positive attribute.

When the enviro's introduce wolves in Iowa, put corn farmers out of business, deny Iowa citizens access to public property, and divert water from families in Des Moines to supply an endangered species, perhaps your outlook will change.

I compliment those in our country, many of whom work for nonprofit organizations. I have a number of letters from them that I will have printed in the RECORD. They toil endlessly, tirelessly, sometimes for no pay, sometimes for little pay, to ensure that future generations of Americans have a good, healthy environment, that those who like to hunt have areas in which we can hunt, where we have healthy wildlife areas.

No pay or little pay? Senator, please have your staff show you the Washington Post series on the Nature Conservancy. Those who are receiving no pay are folks who have been put out of work by the enviro's, and their friends in the Congress and the courts. Nonprofits? The nonprofits in the west are those formerly profitable businesses who couldn't survive under this nations' environmental and regulatory policies. Hunting? You've got to be kidding.

This is not a method of slowing down the bill or taking an undue amount of time, but it is ensuring that we do look at the bill carefully; that the public is generally aware of what is in the bill; that those who perhaps do not spend a lot of time looking at these things - and I am the first to admit this is not an area of my expertise, but as the ranking member of the Agriculture Committee, charged with the responsibility of legislation that impinges upon our national forests that comes under our jurisdiction, I make sure I have good staff who understand the impact of forest legislation. And I have taken the time to study it myself to the extent I have had the time to do so.

Senator, you and Senator Bingaman put a hold on this bill and wanted to hold additional hearings and generally do whatever you could, at the behest of the environmental community, to delay this bill. You know, and I know, if not for the devastating fires in California, you would have kept this bill from coming to a vote. You didn't have to tell us this is not your area of expertise, your comments make that quite evident. We appreciate your attempt to "study it myself", but you really should make fast and frequent tracks back to your office and do some more homework.

I do not pretend to know all the ins and outs of forest legislation as much as my friend from Oregon, for example, who has spent his adult life working on this, or the Senator from Idaho and others who I know have put a great deal of time in this. But that does not lessen my concern about certain aspects of the bill and its impact on our environment. So we will have a discussion and we will have amendments. Preventing damage and injury to communities is of paramount concern to all of us, especially now with the tragic wildfires in California that show clearly the dangers these communities face. Of course, our hearts and our thoughts go out to all those families in those communities that are affected by these wildfires.

Senator you are the former chairman and current ranking member of the Agriculture Committee, "charged with the responsibility of legislation that impinges upon our national forests that comes under our jurisdiction". So why don't you know the in and outs? Why would you put a hold on a bill you don't understand? And why are you on the floor of the Senate discussing a bill you don't know the "ins and outs" of? We don't want your hearts and thoughts, we want to bring science based management to our public lands. Can you understand that?

The way the bill is right now, we could spend a lot of money going out and cleaning out the brush. And, by the way, I will have something to say about that. We are not talking about brush. We are talking about trees. It could be miles, tens of hundreds of miles, away from any community. So again I question whether that is where we want to put our resources.

Senator, I understand that in Iowa a farmer can live in a community and drive to his farm each day. That is generally not the way ranching in the west is done. There are ranch families living out there, Senator. I know, I know, your hearts and thoughts go out to them too.

Another problem I have with this legislation is the lack of protection for roadless areas, those areas of our national forests that have wisely been left free from most logging and roadbuilding to ensure their protection. In fact, this bill does not restrict roadbuilding at all - at all. So you could have permanent roads built anywhere under this bill.

Now we are finally getting to the crux of the matter. At least 20 people dead, more than 2,600 homes destroyed, three-quarters of a million acres burned, but that is not what's important. What's important is we not overturn the Clinton roadless program. Roads preclude wilderness designation. So let's do the enviro's bidding, protect the Clinton era policies, and to hell with the people and resources of the west. Thank you Senator Harkin.

That's enough fun, so let's turn to a professional. Senator Larry Craig took the floor right after Senator Harkin spoke. The following are excerpts from his speech:

Mr. CRAIG. Mr. President, before the ranking member of the Agriculture Committee sits down, I would be more than happy to include the protection of all the old growth in the Federal forests of Iowa in this bill, if it existed. Or maybe we could put a prohibition against wildfires in Iowa on public lands in this bill. And that is something we could accomplish because those two issues - the old growth, which I am sure the State of Iowa wished it had, and wildfires, which I know they would not want - do not exist in Iowa because no Federal forest lands exist there. In my State of Idaho, in the great State of Oregon, and in the Great Basin, West, as much as 60 and 70 percent of our lands within our State borders are public lands and are subject to this legislation...

Let me give a point the Senator from Iowa just made. He said you could log in 1,000-acre increments across the landscape. Not true. Nowhere in the bill does it exist. Let's go back to California today where fires are burning. Let's go to Lake Arrowhead in the San Bernardino forest where there is a complex of dead and dying trees of about 400,000 acres. You could log 1,000 acres there, and then if you chose to do another 1,000 acres near it, you get into the cumulative effect beyond the categorical exclusion and you have to do a NEPA process. That is what this legislation says. That is what the Senator from Iowa did not suggest. He cannot suggest something that does not exist.

Yes, it is true you do 1,000-acre logging increments, but when you get to a cumulative effect beyond the categorical exclusion, NEPA takes over. Therefore, you do the full public process that he admires and I admire because we believe the public ought to have a right to participate, but not ad nauseam through lawsuit after lawsuit for the purpose of delaying activity on the ground when there is bug kill and fuel loading and the public is at risk and the resources are at risk. That is what this debate must be about.

He implied that you could road on forever because this bill does not prohibit roading. You can't road today unless you go through a full NEPA process. It is not to suggest if you prohibit roading here or you do not prohibit it, therefore, roading will exist. That is not true. It does not exist today in current law. So do not imply that it does...

...It is like living near a fire that is ready to burn. All one has to do is drop a match, because the fuel loading that has gone on in these forested landscapes over the last 30 years is dramatic. Why? Because we put fire out. We got awfully good at eliminating fire and we did not replace the natural ecosystem's activities of fire with manmade activity. It is quite simple.

Along came the environmental movement in the 1960s. Along came the National Environmental Policy Act and the National Forest Act in the mid-1970s, and we began progressively to slow our activities on the public lands that were offsetting nature's activities in some instances and the fuel load began to build.

In the mid 1980s, a group of forest scientists from all over the United States met in Sun Valley, ID, to explore the health of our national forests. They concluded that our forests in the Great Basin West were sick, dead, and dying, and that if we did not develop some form of activity to emulate fire, to thin and clean, we would someday in the near future begin to experience dramatic wildfires that would change the character of the landscape of the West. They were right. We did not listen. We could not listen. Why? Because there was a louder voice out there saying: Do nothing, do nothing, stay away; the only way to treat the public lands is to withdraw man from the lands, unless he or she tramples lightly upon them. We did just that, and all of our policies have driven us in that direction. During the Clinton years, we reduced logging on public lands by nearly 80 percent. We did not change any laws, just reused the regulations, headed in another direction with a different philosophy.

Aside from that, there is another interesting statistic. Instead of the average of 1 and a half million to 2 million acres a year in wildfires on our forested public land, we began to see 3, then 3 and a half, 2, then 4, then 5, then 6, and last year 7 million acres, and that graph is going straight up as more of these lands burn because the fuel load that builds on them is so great that all of our forested public lands have become like a kindling box, ready to burn with the touch of a match...