Combating Wildfires in the Western United States

Floor Speech

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Mr. GOSAR. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Montana for organizing this tonight.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to bring this Chamber's attention to the multitude of wildfires that have devastated the Western United States.

Now, Mr. Speaker, the West is on fire and has been on fire since April of this year. This has undoubtedly been one of the worst wildfire seasons in recent memory.

Last month, more than 100 active fires scorched nearly 2 million acres, killed at least 12 people, and caused hundreds of millions of dollars in property damage. As of today, more than 75 wildfires continue to burn throughout the United States.

Wildfires are getting worse, in fact, in the United States just as they are getting better in more similarly advanced nations. A study published in Science last year found that the amount of acreage burning globally has declined by 25 percent over the past 18 years, irrespective of climate and temperature variability. The study's findings point to day-to-day human factors, especially land management, as the most consequential determinants of wildfire acreage burned.

Substantial research and common sense continue to suggest that an imprudent combination of prematurely extinguished spontaneous small burns preventing controlled burns and limiting brush, hazardous fuel, and timber thinning to near-negligible amounts is producing tinderbox- like conditions in our forests, conditions that overdetermine the eventual outcome of catastrophic wildfire.

Our misguided land management assumptions, practices, and policies have ended up as a highly significant factor in ensuring our country's experience with wildfires is worse than that of similarly situated peers. The sad truth is that mismanagement has left our forests vulnerable to insects and disease ripe for catastrophic wildfires.

That is why the Western Caucus led efforts to pass a strong forestry title in the farm bill. The House base bill includes 10 categorical exclusions that allow for active management of our Nation's forests and critical response.

On September 13, a letter spearheaded by the Western Caucus from 40 bipartisan Members of the House was sent to the farm bill conferrees urging conferrees and leadership to include active forest management provisions in the final version of the farm bill. The base bill also reauthorizes the Landscape Scale Restoration Program.

The first meaningful step that can be made to ensure that we can mitigate the frequency and intensity of wildfires next year is for the farm bill conference committee to include these forestry provisions within the final conference report. Otherwise, next year's wildfires, sadly, may be larger than this year's and will be the result of this Congress.

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