Colorado Wilderness Act of 2021

Floor Speech

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Mr. McCLINTOCK. Mr. Speaker, everything we touch in our daily lives, everything that makes our existence possible, everything that makes us more comfortable and more prosperous, everything we see in this Chamber comes to us in only two ways. It is either grown or it is mined. That is a universal truth.

Everything we enjoy on this planet is either grown or mined. Fortunately, nature has given us a super abundance of resources and left it to us to responsibly reap and to manage this bounty.

But it is precisely these resources that the left has waged war against for an entire generation. The very things that make us prosperous and comfortable are the things the left attempts to place off limits.

Is it any wonder that the more they extend their domain, the worse the human conditions that they produce?

This bill declares another 1.5 million acres of public lands, mostly forests, an area about the size of Delaware, a wilderness area, off limits to forest management, timber harvesting, and even many forms of public recreation. An untended forest is like an untended garden. It will grow until it chokes itself to death and succumbs to disease, pestilence, and, ultimately, catastrophic wildfire.

These restrictions have abandoned our forests to neglect and produced the paradox of a severe national lumber shortage while the government sits on vast timber reserves.

This bill places 1,200 more miles of rivers under similar restrictions that create water shortages in some of the most water- abundant regions of our country.

It prevents mineral extraction and energy production from another 1.2 million acres, killing jobs, crushing the economy, and empowering our international adversaries. At a time when the Federal Government's bad management practices have created a $12 billion maintenance backlog, this bill takes another half million acres of land into Federal mismanagement.

Understand what that means to local communities. This is land that is producing no taxes and little commerce. Much is being seized over local objections in States where the Federal Government already controls more than half of their entire land area.

Mr. Speaker, this is a direct attack on working Americans who depend on the resources of our Nation to put food on their tables and a roof over their heads. It is an attack on the prosperity and security of our people, and it is what we have come to expect from the greens gone wild on the other side of the aisle.

The result will be more dead forests, more water shortages, increasing costs for energy and consumer goods, lower wages, and fewer jobs.

These policies always produce want from plenty, and I am afraid they will continue until the American people finally demand that we restore the nation of abundance that we once took for granted.

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