Recovering America's Wildlife Act of 2021

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. FULCHER. Mr. Speaker, I thank the chairman for yielding the time.

As I speak, the West is literally burning. Major infernos are devastating States like California, Arizona, and Alaska.

In New Mexico, the Hermit's Peak fire became the largest in State history nearly 1 month ago and is still not fully contained. This catastrophic fire has burned over 320,000 acres and cost taxpayers a whopping $224 million in fire suppression costs.

In total, over 2.6 million acres have burned this year already, putting us on a pace to surpass every wildfire season in the past decade.

Homes have burned to the ground. Thousands of brave wildland firefighters have put their lives on the line. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent trying to tame fires so intense, they create their own weather systems known as firenados. Why?

The answer is simple. The lack of active forest management and decades of fire suppression and mismanagement have left our Nation's forests as dry as powder kegs and ready to ignite from a single spark.

In the last decade, mismanagement caused over 70 million acres to burn, and we have no signs of it slowing down. According to the U.S. Forest Service, over one billion--that is billion with a b--acres across the country are at risk of experiencing severe wildfires.

That is why I am offering this amendment. My amendment seeks to add forest management activities such as mechanical thinning and prescribed burning that enhance or create wildlife habitat--that is, enhance or create wildlife habitat--or reduce the risk of destruction to wildlife habitat due to wildfires as acceptable projects under the Recovering America's Wildlife Act.

Catastrophic fires remain one of the single greatest threats to wildlife in Western States, such as my home State of Idaho.

In California, the Los Angeles Times reported in 2020 that the Bobcat fire turned one of the most abundant wildlife habitats with lush canyons and a mixture of rare and endangered species into an ``apocalypse'' that looked like ground zero after a nuclear explosion. Experts believe this fire would reverse decades of conservation efforts.

In Oregon, the 2020 wildfires have burned over 360,000 acres of critical spotted owl habitat, pushing the species into what researchers call an extinction vortex.

Catastrophic wildfires recently forced the State of Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife to recommend moving the greater sage- grouse from threatened to endangered status in their State. This is the very action that RAWA seeks to prevent.

These wildfires also killed nearly half of the State's endangered pigmy rabbit population. A Seattle Times report stated that rabbits had asphyxiated as the fire, in its fury, devoured oxygen from the atmosphere. There was nothing but ash and dust. No movement. No footprints. There was no chance anything survived.

Is this what recovering America's wildlife looks like, choking animals in suffocating smoke, burning them alive?

These catastrophic wildland fires are polluting our air, degrading our water, releasing massive amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, and turning rich and diverse wildlife habitat into barren moonscapes.

Incentivizing better, more active forest management through my amendment will create healthier ecosystems and abundant habitat for diverse wildlife. That is exactly what this bill is intended to do. If we truly care about recovering America's wildlife, then you will support my amendment.

If we adopt this, we will instruct the Committee on Natural Resources to add my amendment to include the forest management activities that modify, improve, enhance, or create wildlife habitat or protect wildlife habitat from wildfires as acceptable uses of funding under this bill.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source