Issue Position: Forest Policy

Issue Position

Excess timber comes out of the forest one way or the other: it is either carried out or it burns out. From the inception of the U.S. Forest Service, we managed our public lands according to sound forest management principles. We prevented overcrowding by removing excess timber so that trees had room to grow healthy and strong. This assured not only resilient forests, but also a thriving economy throughout our mountain communities and an important revenue stream to the treasury that was available for additional improvements to the public lands.

But beginning in the 1970's, Congress began enacting laws such as the National Environmental Policy Act and the Endangered Species Act that promised to improve the forest ecology. Routine forest management projects and timber sales became subject to cost prohibitive and endlessly time consuming environmental studies, accompanied by opportunistic litigation. Our once healthy and well maintainned federal forests were consigned to a policy of benign neglect. After 40 years of these laws -- all predicated on the promise they would improve the forest environment -- I believe we are entitled to ask, "How is the forest environment doing?"

The answer is damning. In those years, Federal surplus timber harvests have dropped 80 percent while acreage destroyed by fire has increased concomitantly. The Sierra now has four times the timber density that the acreage can support. In this overcrowded and stressed condition, our trees become susceptible to drought, pestilence, disease and ultimately, catastrophic wildfire. Even after a fire, salvageable trees sit and rot for at least a year before required environmental studies are completed -- during which time they lose most of their marketable value and the acreage is abandoned to scrub brush.

More than 1,000 square miles of forest have been incinerated by wildfire in the last three years in the fourth congressional district, including many habitats these laws were supposed to protect. When laws not only fail to achieve their objective, but are directly counterproductive to their promises, and when they economically devastate local communities to boot, then it is time, as Lincoln said, "that we must think anew and act anew."

The Federal Lands Subcommittee that I chair has produced landmark legislation to restore sound management to our federal forests, and I have introduced legislation to expedite the removal of dead timber, replanting of lost acreage and proper grooming of our surviving acreage.

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