Fix Our Forests Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. McCLINTOCK. Mr. Chairman, over the last 10 years, we have lost fully one-quarter of our Federal forests to catastrophic fire.

An untended forest is no different from an untended garden. It will grow and grow until it chokes itself to death, and then it will succumb to disease, pestilence, drought, and ultimately catastrophic fire. This is how nature gardens. She doesn't care that it takes a century or more for a forest to regrow. We mortals do.

Excess timber will come out of the forest in only two ways. Either we will carry it out, or nature will burn it out. That is why we created the Forest Service, to do our own gardening and remove excess timber before it can choke off the forest.

Every year, foresters would mark off surplus timber, and we would auction it off to logging companies who paid us to remove it. For a century, we enjoyed healthy, fire-resistant and resilient forests.

However, then we passed bureaucratic laws which have made the active management of our forests all but impossible. A simple forest management plan now takes an average of 5.3 years to complete, and it costs millions of dollars, more than the value of the timber to be harvested. Since these laws were passed, timber harvested from Federal lands in California has fallen 75 percent with a concomitant increase in acreage destroyed by fire.

My friend, Mr. Huffman, is concerned about climate change and carbon dioxide. He should know that a UCLA study revealed that just the 2020 fires in California alone released twice as much carbon dioxide as had been prevented by 17 years of the restrictions and regulations that California has imposed, costing its consumers and taxpayers billions of dollars.

Now, we were able to get a categorical exclusion from NEPA for forest thinning projects in the Lake Tahoe Basin in 2016. In the 9 years since its enactment, it has reduced the approval process for forest thinning projects at Tahoe from 5 years to less than 4 months. It has reduced the environmental reports from more than 800 pages down to a few dozen.

Timber harvested has increased from roughly 1 million board feet a year to 9 million board feet a year. The treated acreage has tripled, and the Tahoe forests are returning to fire resiliency. This is what saved the city of South Lake Tahoe from the Caldor fire 2 years ago. The town of Grizzly Flats, which was not protected by this law, was wiped out by the same fire.

I have been trying for years to expand these proven reforms to the rest of the National Forest System through the Proven Forest Management Act. That measure is now included in this legislation, and its enactment is long overdue.

This should not be a partisan issue. The choice is between policies that have proven to work and policies that have proven to fail. Let us return to the policies that work before we run out of forests to burn down.

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