Colorado Outdoor Recreation and Economy Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. WESTERMAN. Madam Chair, as much as I appreciate my colleagues' desire to do something good, I must rise in opposition today to H.R. 823.

As we all know, wilderness designations in theory implement natural management, meaning that man is to have a hands-off approach on the management of the forest. But this is a farce, because when catastrophic wildfires ignite, as they will under natural management, we often rush to put the fires out, which is just as much human management as thinning or other more recognized forestry management processes.

We need wilderness areas in our country, and we need to manage them as such if we want to be intellectually honest in claiming them as wilderness areas. This works in areas like Yellowstone National Park where the predominant species is lodgepole pine that naturally burns to the ground approximately every century, like we saw when one-third of the park burned in the 1980s.

The idea that we can preserve a forest is misguided. Forests are living organisms, and there is only one way to preserve a living organism: first you have to kill it. Take, for instance, a cucumber. If you want to make a pickle, the first thing you do to preserve a cucumber into a pickle is you boil it, you put it in vinegar, you put it in a jar, and you preserve it. If you want to preserve human tissue, you put the tissue in formaldehyde. There is a misnomer that we can preserve our forests because forests are living organisms.

We should be discussing instead conservation. We should want to conserve our forests, like Teddy Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot proposed.

Colorado's forests are currently in an unhealthy state. They are overstocked and infested with insects like the bark and pine beetle. I say that based on a report from the Colorado State Forest Service 2018 Forest Health Report.

It says that, for the seventh consecutive year, Colorado's most widespread and destructive insect pest was the spruce beetle. This insect has now affected more than 1.8 million cumulative acres since 2000, with a total of 178,000 acres of active infestations occurring in high-level Engelmann spruce forests in 2018. A 4-year trend of tens of thousands of new acres infested annually indicates a continuing spread of spruce beetle into previously uninfested forests.

Moreover, more and more Coloradans are living closer to their forests and closer to the risk of wildfire.

Again, from the report:

A recent update to the CSFS-administered Colorado Wildfire Risk Assessment Portal indicated that the population living in areas at risk to wildland fire in Colorado increased to approximately 50 percent from 2012 to 2017, surpassing 2.9 million people.

Madam Chair, Colorado has some great places, some of which are incorporated into this bill. However, as my colleague from Colorado, Mr. Tipton, and others have alluded to, what the State needs is not an attempt at preservation. What they need is the application of science to the forests. They need conservation.

Colorado needs the utilization and management of their forests to restore their health and well-being. These forests need thinning, prescribed fire, and selective timber harvest to restore the appropriate stand density and reduce the beetle epidemic.

What these acres do not need is inaction.

Wilderness prevents any action, which threatens not just the surrounding acreage and the communities that lie within those boundaries. Our congressional responsibility is to be good stewards of our lands and ensure that they are there for future generations.

I have no doubt that was the sponsor's intent when writing this bill. However, we cannot just claim vast swaths of land and call our work done. Instead, we must be precise as to what we are designing and why.

Wilderness, in this case, is not the answer. Natural management will not be followed because when life and property are at risk, we will spend vast resources to extinguish nature's management tools.

Authorizing this action over the objections of State and Federal representation is not wise. The future will be our judge if this land is designated wilderness, and nature will deliver its verdict in time. None of us may even be alive when the verdict is delivered, but I desire for the Record to indicate that I argued on the side of sound science, that I argued to be responsible and use science and management to restore our forest resiliency, and that I argued to make our forest carbon sinks instead of carbon emitters.

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Mr. WESTERMAN. Madam Chairwoman, I argue for wildlife, for water, and for a better environment, and it is because of these reasons that I encourage my colleagues to vote against H.R. 823.

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Mr. WESTERMAN. Will the gentleman yield?

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Mr. WESTERMAN. I would be amenable if we did that, but then it wouldn't be wilderness area.

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