Federal Land Assistance, Management and Enhancement Act

Floor Speech

FEDERAL LAND ASSISTANCE, MANAGEMENT AND ENHANCEMENT ACT -- (House of Representatives - March 25, 2009)

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Mr. McCLINTOCK. I thank the gentleman for yielding.

Mr. Chairman, I certainly support H.R. 1404. It is going to add some flexibility in managing firefighting costs on our Federal lands, but my friend, the gentleman from Washington, is absolutely correct. Our firefighting costs would be much lower and our revenues would be much higher if we'd restore the sound forest management practices that this Congress long ago abandoned. Instead, we've embraced a radical and retrograde ideology that we should abandon our public lands to overpopulation, overgrowth, and benign neglect. Bills like this one are made necessary precisely because of this public falling.

A generation ago we recognized the importance of proper wildlands management. We recognized that nothing is more devastating to the ecology of a forest than a forest fire, and we recognized that in any living community, including forests, dense overpopulation is unhealthy.

And so we carefully groomed our public lands. We removed excessive vegetation, and we gave timber the room it needs to go. Surplus timber and overgrowth were sold for the benefit of our communities. Our forests prospered, our economy prospered, and forest fires were far less numerous and far less severe than we suffer today.

Today, we're seeing the damage done to our forests and to our economy by this Luddite ideology that human beings shouldn't touch our natural resources.

My region in northeastern California has been tormented by devastating fires in the last few years, and the reason is quite simple. As one forester explained it at a hearing we conducted in Sacramento, the excess timber is going to come out of the forests one way or the other. It's either going to be carried out or it's going to be burned out.

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