Fix Our Forests Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. BEYER. Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition to the Fix Our Forests Act, and I rise to fight what could be the first successful attempt to undermine the Endangered Species Act.

I believe that the California people deserve our urgent support to recover and rebuild from the tragic wildfires, and I am disappointed that this was not a productive discussion and a bipartisan discussion to help address what they need.

There are many excellent pieces of legislation that we should be looking at for that support, including many that are bipartisan, like the Modernizing Wildfire Safety and Prevention Act.

Those bills provide much-needed funding, deliver desperately needed support to firefighters, and address the needs of frontline communities. This bill does not.

Instead, it regurgitates long-held logging industry priorities to reshape environmental laws on Forest Service land and allow profit, not science, to dictate forest management decisions.

As a co-chair of the Endangered Species Act Caucus, I am particularly troubled by this bill's rollback of Endangered Species Act enforcement by overturning the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals' Cottonwood decision. This decision basically says that when new science emerges or develops on endangered species, it must be considered in the Endangered Species Act protections.

By the way, the science goes both ways. It can both identify new dangers, but it can also identify successes and reduce stresses to threatened species.

The industry has long tried to include the so-called Cottonwood fix in several pieces of must-pass legislation, most recently in the farm bill. They now see in their response to the California wildfires their newest opportunity to undermine Cottonwood.

This industry wish list item would exempt Federal land management agencies from reconsultation under the Endangered Species Act. That process ensures that Federal agencies' land management plans incorporate the best available science as it becomes available. It is absolutely essential, but this is also a rare occurrence. It doesn't happen very often. When it does, it is important to consider it.

As any student of history and science knows, our shared knowledge is continuously evolving through new inquiry and discovery. If we didn't incorporate new knowledge, then we would still be stuck with the geocentric model of the galaxy, placing the Earth at the center of the universe. Then think about the modern medical system. The modern medical community is built off the 19th century germ theory, which has saved hundreds of millions of lives.

Incorporating new scientific knowledge is the bedrock of our modern society. It makes no sense when new science emerges to close our eyes, put our hands over our ears, and deny what the best science tells us. This antiscience ESA poison pill is dropped in, unconnected to wildlife management.

Yes, we need good-faith forest management efforts to prevent wildfires, but not environmental rollbacks that allow for logging and other ecologically damaging activities that would worsen, not reduce, the risk of destructive wildfires. We need to take real action to mitigate risks and effects, and I am ready to work with all my colleagues to make that happen.

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