[House Hearing, 117 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
FIGHTING FIRE WITH FIRE: EVALUATING THE
ROLE OF FOREST MANAGEMENT IN
REDUCING CATASTROPHIC WILDFIRES
=======================================================================
HEARING
BEFORE THE
SUBCOMMITTEE ON ENVIRONMENT
OF THE
COMMITTEE ON OVERSIGHT AND REFORM
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED SEVENTEENTH CONGRESS
SECOND SESSION
__________
MARCH 16, 2022
__________
Serial No. 117-70
__________
Printed for the use of the Committee on Oversight and Reform
[GRAPHIC NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Available on: govinfo.gov
oversight.house.gov
docs.house.gov
__________
U.S. GOVERNMENT PUBLISHING OFFICE
47-162 PDF WASHINGTON : 2022
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CAROLYN B. MALONEY, New York, Chairwoman
Eleanor Holmes Norton, District of James Comer, Kentucky, Ranking
Columbia Minority Member
Stephen F. Lynch, Massachusetts Jim Jordan, Ohio
Jim Cooper, Tennessee Virginia Foxx, North Carolina
Gerald E. Connolly, Virginia Jody B. Hice, Georgia
Raja Krishnamoorthi, Illinois Glenn Grothman, Wisconsin
Jamie Raskin, Maryland Michael Cloud, Texas
Ro Khanna, California Bob Gibbs, Ohio
Kweisi Mfume, Maryland Clay Higgins, Louisiana
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, New York Ralph Norman, South Carolina
Rashida Tlaib, Michigan Pete Sessions, Texas
Katie Porter, California Fred Keller, Pennsylvania
Cori Bush, Missouri Andy Biggs, Arizona
Shontel M. Brown, Ohio Andrew Clyde, Georgia
Danny K. Davis, Illinois Nancy Mace, South Carolina
Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Florida Scott Franklin, Florida
Peter Welch, Vermont Jake LaTurner, Kansas
Henry C. ``Hank'' Johnson, Jr., Pat Fallon, Texas
Georgia Yvette Herrell, New Mexico
John P. Sarbanes, Maryland Byron Donalds, Florida
Jackie Speier, California Vacancy
Robin L. Kelly, Illinois
Brenda L. Lawrence, Michigan
Mark DeSaulnier, California
Jimmy Gomez, California
Ayanna Pressley, Massachusetts
Russ Anello, Staff Director
Katie Thomas, Subcommittee Staff Director
Amy Stratton, Deputy Chief Clerk
Contact Number: 202-225-5051
Mark Marin, Minority Staff Director
------
Subcommittee on Environment
Ro Khanna, California, Chairman
Jim Cooper, Tennessee Ralph Norman, South Carolina,
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, New York Ranking Minority Member
Rashida Tlaib, Michigan Bob Gibbs, Ohio
Jimmy Gomez, California Pat Fallon, Texas
Raja Krishnamoorthi, Illinois Yvette Herrell, New Mexico
Cori Bush, Missouri
C O N T E N T S
----------
Page
Hearing held on March 16, 2022................................... 1
Witnesses
Panel 1
Randy Moore, Chief, U.S. Forest Service, Department of
Agriculture
Oral Statement................................................... 7
Panel 2
Ali Meders-Knight, master traditional ecological knowledge (TEK)
practitioner, Mechoopda Indian Tribe of Chico Rancheria
Oral Statement................................................... 18
Dominick A. DellaSala, Ph.D., Chief Scientist, Wild Heritage
Project of Earth Island Institute
Oral Statement................................................... 20
Michael Gollner, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Mechanical
Engineering;
University of California, BerkeleyDeb Faculty Fellow, Berkeley
Fire Research Lab
Oral Statement................................................... 22
Carole King, celebrated singer-songwriter and land conservation
advocate
Oral Statement................................................... 24
James Hubbard, Former USDA Undersecretary, Natural Resources and
Environment
Oral Statement................................................... 25
Written opening statements and statements for the witnesses are
available on the U.S. House of Representatives Document
Repository at: docs.house.gov.
Index of Documents
----------
* Western Governor's Association Policy Resolution 2021-03
National
Forest and Rangeland Management.
* Yellowstone to Uintas Connection Caribou Prescribed Fire
Restoration Project.
* Citizen Comments on Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection
Act Attendance.
* United Nations Environment Program report, Spreading Like
Wildfire; submitted by Chairman Khanna.
* Yellowstone to Uintas Connection National Forest
Environmental Analysis Comments.
* Citizen Comments on Forest Service Policy.
Documents entered into the record during this hearing and
Questions for the Record (QFR's) are available at:
docs.house.gov.
FIGHTING FIRE WITH FIRE: EVALUATING THE
ROLE OF FOREST MANAGEMENT IN
REDUCING CATASTROPHIC WILDFIRES
----------
Wednesday, March 16, 2022
House of Representatives
Subcommittee on Environment
Committee on Oversight and Reform
Washington, D.C.
The subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 10:11 a.m., in
room 2154, Rayburn House Office Building, and via Zoom; Hon.
Rho Khanna, (chairman of the subcommittee) presiding.
Present: Representatives Khanna, Maloney, Ocasio-Cortez,
Tlaib, Krishnamoorthi, Norman, Comer, Gibbs, Fallon, and
Herrell.
Mr. Khanna. The committee will come to order.
Without objection, the chair is authorized to declare a
recess of the committee at any time.
I welcome everyone to this hearing. I am grateful to our
esteemed panelists for joining us today.
The climate crisis and misguided forestry policies have
given rise to catastrophic burning across our western forests,
including in my home state of California. For decades, the
Forest Service's strategy for managing fires was to suppress
all fires. In 1935, the Forest Service established the so-
called 10 a.m. policy, meaning they would put out every fire by
10 a.m. the next day. However, fire is a natural part of the
landscape in Western forests. Some trees in these forests even
need to be exposed to fire to grow and reproduce. In recent
decades, fortunately, the Forest Service policy has changed
because the landscape was deprived of fire for decades.
However, dense vegetation has accumulated. That means when
there are wildfires, they burn hotter and create more damage,
feeding off the dry brush.
Climate change is also worsening wildfires. Last month, the
United Nations called for urgent action and a new report
warning that if we continue with business-as-usual climate
pollution, we will have 57 percent more wildfires by the end of
this century. Drier conditions make it easier for wildfires to
spread and increase their intensity. Droughts leave trees with
less water to fight of disease and pests. Dead and drying trees
are less fire resistant. Climate change combined with the fuel
buildup cause extreme wildfires, fire disasters that can be
deadly. The top five years with the largest amount of wildfire
acreage burned since 1960 were 2006, 2007, 2015, 2017 and 2020.
From 2000 to 2018, wildfires burned more than twice as much
land per area than those in the 1980's.
Without objection, I submit the United Nations Environment
Program report titled, ``Spreading like Wildfire: The Rising
Threat of Extraordinary Landscape Fires,'' into the record.
We are not immune to this problem in my district in Silicon
Valley. In 2020, Santa Clara University Complex blanketed my
district with smoke and unhealthy levels of smoke for weeks.
Land managers, like the Forest Service, had a hard job in
addressing this crisis. They must balance, first and foremost,
human safety from wildfires, but also the economy, healthy
ecosystems, and meeting climate goals. Unfortunately, special
interests seek to present industrial management of forests as a
solution to out-of-control wildfires. According to public
disclosures, industry interest in forestry management spent
over $12 million to influence Congress. Not only do they spend
to influence politicians. They work hard to influence the
public as well. They spend millions of dollars annually on
advertising, defending many states' weak forestry laws.
Special interests are influencing the policy process to
acquire more contracts, saying that we can thin and log our way
to fires that will be easier to suppress and control. However,
this is not the full truth. While some management, including
removing brush and small trees, is crucial to returning forests
to healthy state, industries too often incentivize to remove
the largest trees to sell for building materials and other
forestry products. Clear cutting or removing large trees puts
communities at greater risks. Our forests evolved alongside
fire and older larger trees that are often the most fire
resistant. Depending on local circumstances, thinning forests
can also increase fire risk if not done cautiously in a
science-based manner. Some thinning is necessary according to
the science, but it has to be done cautiously in accordance
with the principles.
Too much thinning and forests can dry out from exposure to
wind and sun and create conditions for high winds. In fact,
ProPublica found that public lands that were clear cut in the
last five years, burn hotter than Federal land that cut fewer
trees. We cannot allow short-term financial gains to substitute
for collaborative, careful forest management based on the
science.
Another reason it is important to prioritize fire
prevention is to help our wildland firefighters, who risk their
lives and help each year to protect communities and still
aren't paid enough and don't have yearlong healthcare benefits.
Wildland firefighters are grappling with longer fire seasons
and longer burning fires, which means more overtime and
exposure to deadly smoke. Congress must conduct careful
oversight to make sure that the U.S. Forest Service has the
tools they need to reduce large fires and the resources to pay
our firefighters. We don't want to make the situation worse by
removing the big trees that store the most carbon and slow
wildfires down. We want to have a science-based approach to
forest management. We need to listen to the science and pursue
a community-driven process that incorporates all perspectives
to forge the best way forward for our forests.
I now recognize our esteemed Ranking Member Norman for an
opening statement.
Mr. Norman. Thank you, Chairman. Chairman Ro Khanna, I
appreciate you holding this hearing.
Wildfires are an important issue. In 2021, there were
nearly 60,000 wildfires that burned over 7 million acres. That
is devastating for so many parts of the country. Ms. Maloney, I
met with Carole King yesterday, who I am a fan of. I grew up
with her music. She thinks the world of you. We had a great
conversation. My questions to her, and we got Sumter National
Forest in South Carolina. And my question was, one, do trees
have lives? And two, what do we do about the four-feet thatch
that has built up, because, mostly, a lot of your fires today
are in lands that nothing has been done. And we had, you know,
disagreement, but the passion that she has is, I respect, and I
would love to have an open debate about that.
These fires that occurred in 2021 were on par with the 5-
and 10-year national averages. So why are we now getting around
to having a hearing about wildfires? I think the answer is
obvious. Last week, we were supposed to have a hearing on how
bad the oil and natural gas industry are, but that issue no
longer fits to the Democrat narrative. The hearing was
canceled, and the Environment Subcommittee needed something to
do. Why else would we wait over a year into the 117th Congress
to talk about important issues like wildfires? For weeks, the
Democrats paraded board members from oil and gas companies to
appear before this committee. They even threatened to subpoena
witnesses that have been fully compliant with the Democrats'
sham investigations. Given the events of recent weeks, namely
Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Democrats finally came to the
realization that a continued assault on domestic energy
production was no longer politically expedient.
Russia's grip on European energy showcases how crucial it
is that America expand its capacity for production and
capacities for oil and natural gas to secure our own energy
independence and assist our allies with energy needs throughout
the world. Buying from rogue countries does not make sense,
particularly now when we have Russia practicing genocide on the
country of Ukraine. What President Biden does not seem to
understand is that America stands ready to fill the void on the
energy needs of our allies in times of geopolitical crisis. For
the sake of national security, we must position our domestic
energy resources to protect the freedom of democracy, both at
home and abroad.
Some Biden Administration officials think we can drive our
way out of this self-inflicted crisis with electric vehicles,
but this elitist idea doesn't take into account that the
average cost of an electric vehicle is $55,000. The median
household income is 67,000. It is completely out of touch to
think Americans can afford to use 84 percent of their annual
income on an electric car. For Pete Buttigieg, who is Secretary
of Transportation, to say go out and buy an electric car is
disconnected from reality.
I got a reality check for the Democrats on this committee
and President Biden: Americans are still reliant on oil and
gas. Our constituents need them to drive their cars and heat
and power their homes and businesses, but Democrats want the
American people to risk their livelihoods and way of life. They
want to end the use of oil and gas immediately. This is an
unsustainable proposition. Unfortunately, they are trying to
accomplish this goal by berating American oil and gas companies
into submission, constantly holding hearings, demanding
mountains of documents, and vilifying an entire industry. Yet
none of these actions will change the fact that we need to use
our domestic oil and gas supplies now more than ever. The
stakes are just too high.
America has demonstrated that we can safely utilize our oil
and gas reserves to the benefit of our people and can bring
energy stability to a world that is turned to chaos on the whim
of irrational foreign actors. America is blessed with abundant
natural resources, including oil and natural gas. No, but
Democrats don't want to use them to our advantage. I am so
tired of the left's notion that we must take a backseat to
Russia and China on energy issues.
As for the topics of this hearing today, I am looking
forward to hearing from Mr. Hubbard, the former undersecretary
for natural resources and environment at the United States
Department of Agriculture, who knows firsthand about wildfire
responses. The Democrats and the left-wing environmental groups
push the narrative that climate change is the sole reason for
the worsening fire crisis, but that is just not the case.
Science clearly shows that active forest management is the best
way to prevent wildfires.
In 2020, 70 percent of the United States' average that
burned occurred on Federal lands. That statistic is a clear
reflection of the mismanagement of our national forest and
public lands. We need to focus on real science-based solutions
to ensure that the Forest Service can accelerate the scope and
scale of Federal forest management to ensure a sustainable and
resilient future. I appreciate the Chief of the Forest Service
appearing today before the committee, but I would urge that the
Democrats are serious about conducting oversight of this
Administration, that they invite more Federal Government
witnesses to these hearings.
I thank the witnesses for their participation today, and I
yield back.
Mr. Khanna. Thank you, Ranking Member Norman. And before I
give it to the chair, our distinguished Chair Maloney, let me
just say we obviously share an admiration for Carole King.
There is common ground there. And we also, I think, share a
common commitment to standing with Ukraine and President
Zelensky and their fight against Putin's unprovoked brutal war.
We--I think we are unified in this Congress in making sure no
Russian oil comes to the United States shores.
And in terms of the points you raised on gas, I have great
respect for the ranking member, but we have genuine sometimes
disagreements. But one thing I want to make clear is that I am
for, and I think many Democrats are for, a short-term increase
in production to make sure gas prices go down. I think that is
something we should--there was a proposal to increase buying to
fill up our strategic reserves, and I am for increasing short-
term production. I think long term the way you defeat the
petrostates, like Russia, like Saudi Arabia, like Iran, like
Venezuela, is by having a moonshot for renewable energy, but
you certainly can respond after. The chairwoman just wanted to,
for the record, make that clear.
Now let me yield to our distinguished Chairwoman Maloney.
Chairwoman Maloney. Thank you, Chairman Ro Khanna and
Ranking Member Norman, for your leadership on this issue and
for holding this very important and timely hearing this
morning. And I would like to be associated with the words of
Mr. Ro Khanna. President Biden has called upon the American oil
industry, which we are proud of in many ways, to pump more oil,
and we are hopeful that they will respond and pump more oil.
They do have that oil, so we should pump that oil. He has also
called for a release of oil from the strategic preserve. We all
support that also.
And we all just came from a heartbreaking meeting,
bipartisan, by Zoom with President Zelensky. And the most
moving part for me was not only his plea for unity and help as
he fought for freedom and justice in the world and in Ukraine,
but he showed beautiful pictures of Ukraine and then the
destruction of it with the bombs and the fires, and how it was
destroying their way of life. And I think all of us love the
forests that we have in our country. There are too many fires.
Maybe we will understand more what is causing them, but
whatever is causing them, we have got to join hands and work
together to preserve our wildlife, preserve our forests, and it
is important to our environment.
As our country continues to experience increasingly
frequent and severe wildfires and other natural disasters, the
climate crisis has never been more dire. The United Nations
report issued last month detailed how climate change and poor
land use decisions will make wildfires more frequent and
intense. All seasons will be fire seasons, and extreme fires
will be more common, increasing by up to 30 percent by 2050 and
by up to 50 percent by the end of the century. The U.N. report
called on all nations, including the U.S., to change how we
think of wildfires. Our emergency service workers and
firefighters on the frontlines are crucial to our response, and
they need more support.
In addition to fire suppression, we need to prioritize fire
mitigation. We have a responsibility to invest more in fire
risk reduction, to work with local and indigenous communities
who know the land, and to strengthen our global commitment to
fight climate change. That is why I am grateful that today's
witnesses who are joining us to explain what Congress, the
Forest Service, and vulnerable communities can do if we work
together.
First, we must act to address climate change. The United
Nations has found that nations' current climate pledges fall
far too short of what is necessary to avert disaster. If
current trends continue, global warming will exceed 1.5 degrees
before the middle of the century, a point at which scientists
say our planet will suffer irreversible damage. To avert this
disaster, we need to immediately cut fossil fuel emissions by 3
to 4 percent each year and rapidly transition to net-zero
carbon emissions. Second, we also need to protect our forests,
which absorb carbon emissions out of the air and lock them in
trees and soil, helping our environment. Our forests are
precious ecosystems that support all kinds of diverse plant and
animal life. They also provide essential natural resources from
food to medicine. Forests also support the lives and
livelihoods of local communities.
Despite their clear benefits and natural beauty, our
forests are under attack. Whether it is due to climate change,
or timber industry, or other reasons, we continue to lose our
forests, along with the animals and plants that live in them.
Many want us to believe that forests thick with trees fuel
bigger and more destructive blazes, but that I am told by
scientists is not true. That is why I introduced H.R. 1755, the
Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act, or NREPA. NREPA is
the kind of sweeping systemic solution our Nation needs to
preserve pristine lands and benefit our environment. My bill
would designate approximately 23 million acres of wild lands in
the continental Northwest as wilderness. It would also
designate approximately 1,800 miles of rivers and streams as
wild and scenic rivers.
This legislation would bring us significantly closer to
President Biden's goal of protecting 30 percent of our lands
and waters by 2030. My bill would also help us meet the goals
of the Paris Agreement by preserving large swaths of forests
and help cancel out our Nation's carbon pollution emissions.
And it will allow generations of Americans, including our
children, our grandchildren, to continue to enjoy these
pristine, beautiful wild places.
I want to thank our Forest Service chief, Randy Moore, and
each of our witnesses for their testimony today and their
service, and I am particularly grateful to the songwriter and
great singer, probably the greatest in our time, Carole King is
with us today. She is one of the few singers who is in both the
Songwriters Hall of Fame and the Singers Hall of Fame, but she
is here today as an environmentalist. She has been a champion
for our public lands and for the struggle to preserve them for
future generations. And I am very thankful for her leadership
and advocating for the Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection
bill. Together, we will pass this bill and help our country
meet its goals of protecting our country, our lands, our shared
waters, and combating fires, combating climate change.
I look forward to this hearing and the important topics
that will be covered today. I want to thank, again, the
chairman and the ranking member for calling this hearing, and I
yield back. And a very special welcome to Mr. Moore, and thank
you for your public service, and we look forward to your
comments. I yield back.
Mr. Khanna. Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you for your
leadership and helping make this happen and the conversations
you have had with Carole King and others. And you have been a
great leader on this topic, so thank you. Ranking Member
Norman, I want to give you, out of fairness, if you or anyone
on your side wants to say anything. If you don't, that is fine,
too.
Mr. Norman. No, thank you, Chairman Ro Khanna. I would just
say that the horse before us now, is--what we are discussing
today is important, but it is pale in comparison to what is
going on with this Administration. And, you know, getting from
the strategic oil reserves is not going to do it. We have got
to open up what he has shut down, which is the Keystone
pipeline, and the oil from Alaska, and oil from Canada. And to
buy it from OPEC, which is 15 countries made up of Iraq, Iran,
Venezuela, these countries do not have our best interests at
heart. So why are we not self-sufficient like we were under the
Trump administration? We were exporters of energy.
We are just feeding the beast that is conducting genocide
on an innocent country that, as Mrs. Maloney said, we saw
heartbreaking pictures today of children. The people of Ukraine
did nothing wrong other than want freedom. And to be attacked,
and then for this country to be beholden to countries that are
aiding and abetting Russia is simply wrong. And President Biden
either doesn't understand or is totally disconnected from
reality to keep these oil and gas reserves shut down in our
country. And I call on him now open back up the reserves. Let's
get this country back up and running. Let's quit buying it from
OPEC.
On the wildfires, 70 percent come on forests on the natural
Federal lands that are managed by the Federal Government, and,
as I mentioned before, all you got to do is walk it. And, Mr.
Moore, I would be interested to hear your comments. The thatch
is three feet. One match would strike the whole fire. And then
as I learned from Carole King, who, again, I like and the
doctor that was with her, they would let good sal timber trees
die because it holds carbon. We, America, makes one-sixth of
the carbons across the world now--one-sixth. Yet China is
building a coal plant every week, so it doesn't make sense. And
as Greta Thunburg said when I asked her what are you going to
do about China, she said best we ask them to be nice. That is
not acceptable in a world today that we are seeing the horrors
of the countries that are run by socialists and communists, and
we got to fight it.
I yield back.
Mr. Khanna. Thank you, Ranking Member. Now I would like to
introduce our witness, Mr. Randy Moore, chief of the U.S.
Forest Service. The witness will be unmuted so we can swear him
in.
Sir, please raise your right hand.
Do you swear or affirm that the testimony you are about to
give is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,
so help you God?
Mr. Moore. I do.
Mr. Khanna. Let the record show that the witness answered
in the affirmative. Thank you.
Without objection, your written statements will be made
part of the record.
With that, Mr. Moore, you are now recognized for your
testimony.
STATEMENT OF RANDY MOORE, CHIEF, U.S. FOREST SERVICE, U.S.
DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE
Mr. Moore. Chairman Khanna, Ranking Member Norman, and
members of the subcommittee, thank you for the invitation to
testify before you today.
Caring for the land and serving people, that is what we are
really all about. We cannot fulfill this mission without
successfully combating the wildfire crisis that is occurring.
Our job is to sustain the healthy, resilient landscapes for all
the benefits of the people, both now and for generations to
come. Nationwide, more than 60 million people living in 3,400
communities across 36 states depend on the national forests and
grasslands for their drinking water. This includes great cities
like Portland, Denver, Atlanta, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and
many more.
The National Forest System is a tremendous source of jobs
and economic opportunities for hundreds of millions of
Americans. In 2020, for example, the National Forest System
supported more than 370,000 jobs and contributed more than $37
billion to the GDP, and that is a very conservative number when
you look at the value of water that flows through and off
National Forest System lands. That is many times more than the
annual budget of $8 billion that the Forest Service received.
All of this is now at risk on forests and grasslands
nationwide. Changing environmental conditions have lengthened
fire seasons into fire years and worsened wildfires across the
West. Drought has contributed to outbreaks of disease and
insects that have killed 10's of millions of acres of forests
across the West.
At the same time that our forests are getting evermore
overgrown and unhealthy, developers put in evermore homes into
fire-prone landscapes in the wildland urban interface and
increasing wildfire risk. Altogether, it is a recipe for a
catastrophic wildfire, especially in the West. We face a
national wildfire crisis that has been building for decades.
Over the past 20 to 40 years, we have seen growing fire sizes,
more extreme fire behavior and fire seasons lengthen into fire
years. In 3 of the last 7 years, more than 10 million acres
burned nationwide. That is more than six times the size of
Delaware. This unprecedented scale and extent of wildfire
threatens key ecological values, including carbon storage,
species habitat, soil stability, and watershed function, in
some cases even resulting in long-term deforestation.
Unless we do something about the wildfire crisis, it will
only get worse. Based on decades of science and experience, we
know what to do. To protect communities and natural resources,
we need to restore healthy, resilient fire-adapted forests. In
overgrown forests, we need to use mechanical and other means to
restore the landscape to something approaching historical
stocking levels. Then we need to return low intensity wildland
fire to those fire adapted forests. In the right places at the
right scale, our thinning and burning treatment works. We have
case after case and study after study to prove it. Last year,
the Caldor fire in California blew right through scattered
small treatments on the Eldorado National Forest, then hit an
area of treatment at scale at on the Lake Tahoe Basin
Management Unit. These treatments at scale modified fire
behavior enough for firefighters to keep the fire from burning
into South Lake Tahoe.
For decades, we have been putting fuels and forest health
treatments into place but rarely at the scale needed. It will
take a paradigm shift to control the wildfire crisis facing the
Nation. The old paradigm is to use limited funds and capacity
to scatter treatments randomly across the landscape to the best
of our limited ability. The new paradigm is to step up the pace
and scale of our treatments to match the actual scale of
wildfires across the landscapes. We need to put that paradigm
into action, and that is what we are here to discuss.
We work with scientists, states, tribal governments, and
partner organizations to prepare a 10-year strategy and draft
implementation plan for confronting this crisis. We plan to
dramatically increase fuels and forest health treatments by up
to four times the current treatment levels in the West where
the wildfire risk to homes and communities is highest. We will
fully sustain treatment levels in the South, the Midwest, and
the Northeast.
We deeply appreciate Congress' passage of the bipartisan
infrastructure law, which provides a significant downpayment on
the work we intend to accomplish under this strategy. We now
have the science and tools we need to size and place treatments
in a way that will truly make a difference. Less than 10
percent of fire-prone fires in the West account for roughly 80
percent of the fire risk to communities. We will focus on the
high-priority fire sheds where the risk to life, homes,
communities, and natural resources is greatest. Under our 10-
year strategy, we will place treatments over and above our
current treatment levels. We will treat up to an additional 20
million acres on National Forest System's land, and we will
work with partners to treat up to an additional 30 million
acres of Federal, state, tribal, and private lands.
The Forest Service cannot succeed in this alone. The
wildfire crisis facing the Nation confronts us across
ownerships. This is not just about the National Forest Systems.
We are all in this together. Fortunately, we have decades of
experience working through partnerships and shared goals and
shared landscapes. So, in closing, I am grateful to the leaders
from across the country for stepping up to help us finalize,
through planning, for our wildfire crisis strategy. I am
grateful to our partners for stepping up to help us carry out
this strategy. And finally, I am grateful to you all for your
interest and your support.
Thank you for this opportunity, and I will be pleased to
take any questions that you may have.
Mr. Khanna. Thank you, you Chief Moore. I now recognize
myself for five minutes of questioning.
In January of this year, the Department of Agriculture
announced a 10-year plan to address our wildfire crisis. The
plan calls for treating an additional 20 million acres on
national forests and grasslands and 30 million acres on other
government and private land. Chief Moore, how will you
accomplish the targets laid out in this ambitious long-term
strategy to confront the wildfire crisis?
Mr. Moore. Our first goal is to represent our partners
across the many different landscapes. So we have put together
this 10-year strategy, as you have mentioned, 20 million
Federal forest service lands and another 30 million other lands
where there are other Federal tribal lands or private lands.
And what we are trying to focus on initially is to look at
those fire sheds that are high risk and put communities at the
highest risk of fires. Now, this bill, this bipartisan
infrastructure bill, gives us a really good downpayment on
trying to address those communities that are at risk. And so
our goal by this spring is to release the projects that we have
chosen to start this process.
Now we are having to make some choices, some tough choices
in some locations, because while the bipartisan infrastructure
legislation is a good shot in the arm, it does not address all
of the communities that are at risk. I mentioned the 3,400
communities that are at risk from that, but we will start that
selection process this spring, probably in April. And then we
intend to have projects on the ground and actually working
toward the 10-year strategy this year.
Mr. Khanna. Chief Moore, do you have enough resources and
funding to carry out this plan, or do you need more resources,
and do you need more resources? I understand a lot of the
wildfire firefighters, you know, get paid maybe 40 grand a year
putting their lives at risk, do not have a health care at the
time they are not doing it. What do we need to do to pay them
more?
Mr. Moore. Well, in the bipartisan infrastructure
legislation, it does lay out some things that we want to do for
firefighters. One is to hire 1,000 additional firefighters
between Forest Service and Department of Interior. The other
thing is to really look at the minimum pay for our
firefighters, particularly down to lower scales, the entry-
level type positions. And then also, the bill also allows us to
create a firefighter series to put them in as a special pay
series. So we are working with DOI as well as OPM trying to get
that implemented, and there is a sense of urgency to get that
in.
Mr. Khanna. Would more resources help?
Mr. Moore. Yes, more resources would certainly help.
Mr. Khanna. Now I want to turn to thinning because a lot of
the issues on these hearings will be about that. Do you
acknowledge there are times--I understand there are times that
the thinning is needed, but the science--do acknowledge that
there are times that contractors with thinning may leave behind
more flammable material, like dead branches, or go into large
fire-resistant trees and increase the fire intensity if it is
not done properly.
Mr. Moore. Yes, the problem we have--one of the problems we
have on our National Forest System lands is that we need to
create new and different markets than what we currently have.
The vast majority of the material we have out there is what we
call low-value, small-diameter woods. And so we need to work
with industry and others to help create new industries to
utilize that material. In some cases, we are having to pay to
remove it out of the woods because it would become a fire
hazard for our firefighters who are responding to fires in the
future, but also for our publics that are visiting a National
Forest. And so we do need to find a source to use this
material.
Mr. Khanna. But you agree that there are times we should
not be thinning large trees, for example, right, big trees?
Mr. Moore. Well, you know, that requires really a
complicated response. You know, what we need to be looking at
is the scale of this fire. We need to treat the scale of the
problem at a landscape scale. And so while I talk about small
diameter, low value materials, we do not want to limit
ourselves about what is needed. And I think we need to be
realistic about the industry that we do have in this country
and look at how we can balance how we make that landscape
help----
Mr. Khanna. I guess, Chief Moore because my time is about
to expire, let me just ask this. Would you be committed to
sitting down with some of the other advocates who are concerned
about the thinning process? And, you know, I understand there
are different signs here, but there are some consensus and
concern that sometimes the thinning may go too far. Would you
be willing to sit down with all of the communities, including
the indigenous communities, to see how we can have the best
science dictate our policies?
Mr. Moore. Absolutely, I would.
Mr. Khanna. I now recognize Ranking Member Norman for five
minutes of questions.
Mr. Norman. Thank you, Chairman Ro Khanna. Chief Moore, in
2020, 70 percent of the acreage burned in the United States was
on Federal lands. This seems like a clear reflection of the
state of our national forest and public lands. Can you explain
why a large majority of acreage burned is on Federal lands, not
on private lands? And as I mentioned earlier, and as Chairman
Ro Khanna mentioned, I got the impression from Ms. King and the
doctor with her, they just were not cutting any size tree at
all and were willing to, again, let the thatch buildup 2 or 3
feet. And all it takes is walking the land to see that is a
fire hazard. That is one of the reasons why, and I think they
and I asked them, they thought the atmospheric conditions of
the land that is privately owned started the fires.
Now, by having a conversation on, at some point, cutting
trees rather than there is an economic benefit to this country,
whether it is thinning it or not, but trees have lives, am I
not right? And can you discuss some of this?
Mr. Moore. If I understand your question, Congressman, let
me start by saying that everyone is right in their position,
but a lot of the times, there is no context with it. And when I
look at the problem that is really occurring out there, let us
start with the fact that 90 percent of the fires that have
started are human caused--90 percent. A lot of those fires do
not start on National Forest System lands. Now, the fact that
those fires that start on National Forest System's lands, we
have a 98-percent success rates in suppressing those fires
before they turn into large fires. So what we are really
talking about here are the two percent of the fires that grow
into large fires, and they are devastating, and they are
catastrophic, so I do not want to downplay the significance of
those fires. What is happening, though, is that we have
conditions out on the landscape that are ripe for catastrophic
fires, and we need to remove a significant amount of material
off the landscape.
Mr. Norman. How do you mean remove it?
Mr. Moore. We need to take it off the landscape because
right now, if you look at the, you called it, I believe, brush.
Mr. Norman. Thatch.
Mr. Moore. When you look at the thatch, that is a southern
term, which I am familiar with, out West is a small material,
well, the shrubs or whatnot, but be that as it may, that is
kindling for a fire. And what happens is that when that fire
starts on the ground, it climbs up the ladder of the different
levels of vegetation until it gets into the crown of the trees,
and then the wind carries it significantly.
Mr. Norman. Does the thatch or the tree limbs, whatever you
want to call it, does that contribute to it?
Mr. Moore. Yes, of course it does.
Mr. Norman. And if you can't cut logs and pass through the
forest, which most environmentalist are not for any type of
access to it, does that not drive up the cause of these
catastrophic fires?
Mr. Moore. Yes, there is a cause that is driven to that. I
mean, like I said, the problem is a lot more complex than that,
you know. We do have very sensitive and dangerous species that
we need to be concerned about, and so we have to consider that.
Let's take a look at 1935 when we had the 10 a.m. policy, where
we will look to put the fire out before 10 a.m. the next
morning. And part of that is because of the significance that
the forest played in helping to build this country, and that
was the right decision at that time. But 100 years later
almost, we look back at that decision, this country has changed
significantly, is more populated, more urban and interface
influence, and so we can't allow those fires to burn because
there is too much at risk. And so what we have to do now is
really not do away with the traditional industry. We need that.
We need to carry that forward. And at the same time, we need to
be looking at new industries, new markets, to look at how do we
utilize that material that doesn't have a lot of value, you
know. That material that is not a sal log, but inclusive of sal
log and all the material that is out there, how do we make use
of that to create job opportunities in a small rural community?
And that is the challenge I think that we have, and that is
what we want to pursue.
Mr. Norman. I have got 28 seconds. Does that not mean when
the timber gets to a certain diameter that you cut, whether
standing in on the thatch? Does that not mean getting logging
trails through this, you can get the timber out and also get
the thatch out? I have got 10 seconds.
Mr. Moore. OK. So maybe we can come back to that, but, you
know, we have a forest plan, and in that forest plan, we have a
desired condition. And it is almost like a section out all
across the forest, and we want to try to achieve certain
desired conditions out there. So we use our Silviculture
prescriptions to get at that desired condition that we describe
in the forest plan. And so in some cases, we do want to go
ahead and do exactly what you say. In some cases, recreation is
the emphasis, and the Silviculture prescription may be
different for that. In some cases it is by country, some cases
it is roadways, some cases it is wilderness, and each one of
those areas have certain desired conditions and require certain
management types to take place to keep that desired condition
out there.
Mr. Norman. Great. Thank you so much.
Mr. Khanna. Thank you, Ranking Member Norman. I now
recognize Representative Gibbs for five minutes of questioning.
Mr. Gibbs. Thank you. Thank you. First, I want to comment
on your brief colloquy you had at the beginning, Mr. Chairman,
when talking about the encouraging oil production. You talked
about, short-term, that is new development, for me. But the
problem is the other side of the aisle keeps recently talking
about windfall profits, tax on oil and energy companies. That
is not encouraging investing in this country because to put a
well in takes millions of dollars and short-term investment. I
don't know what your definition of ``short term'' is, but if it
is months or even a year that is not going to make it happen,
and it is really sad. We had the Ukrainian thing today that the
President saw what was happening. And we could solve all of our
problems if we warp speed our energy production in this
country, and it puts Putin behind in everything. And we can
solve a lot of problems, and we can create a lot of jobs, and
we can do it in a lot environmentally friendlier than the rest
of the world. So I just want to get my two cents in on that.
Mr. Moore, you know, talk about forestry management. And I
have seen pictures where we have had major forest fires in a
forest, public lands, and then right next door would be a
private managed land, and the fire didn't seem to get ahold.
And so is some of that because they are timbering in that and
they are managing it better? And I guess that leads into my
couple of questions. What supports the policy, the Forest
Service, when it comes to timber harvesting and controlled
burns? What is your policy?
Mr. Moore. Well, policy around timber harvesting, I mean,
we certainly have a policy and a program to look at having a
viable timber program. I want to say--you know, I mentioned
context earlier. I want to say that we have to go back a little
ways where what has happened to the Forest Service that we are
not managing the forest to the level that we used to in the
past. And a part of that has to do with, you know, how fire has
significantly grown in this country. And as fire has increased
and the season that turned into fire years, you know, we have
had to put a lot of our resources to fire. And what has
happened is that over the last few years, and it has been
growing. We are about 40 percent below our natural resource
professionals. And those were the professionals who put
together timber sales, who put together a lot of the resource
areas to keep the forest healthy. So we are down about 40
percent of resources where we used to be in order to manage the
forest at a much higher level.
And so with the bipartisan infrastructure language and the
legislation, we are very hopeful to start filling those
positions. In fact, we have just filled hundreds of positions,
and we currently have 200 forestry positions out there that we
are looking to fill now. And so this bipartisan infrastructure
legislation has given us a really good shot in the arm to try
to recover some of those resources, some of those positions
that we have lost. Now, we are not going to try to get back to
the way we were, I mean----
Mr. Gibbs. I mean, so you are saying we haven't been doing
enough timber harvesting because we didn't have the personnel
in place to put the contracts together. So that, you know, that
could be a policy change that came from Washington, DC, to
discourage timber harvesting?
Mr. Moore. You know, I would look at it as though it is not
so much timber harvest as it is managing the vegetation on the
forest. And managing that vegetation on the forest, you know,
you have a number of products that come off. Timber sales is
certainly one of those products that we use to help manage the
forest. And so we still need to do more of that because we have
so much material on the landscape. I will give an example if I
can. When you look at conditions back at the turn of the
century and even before, and when you look at a Ponderosa
Forest or a mixed conifer type forest--these are adapted
ecosystems--you probably had about 60 trees per acre. Today,
you could have 800 trees per acre on that same piece of land.
And so when we talk about trying to get that piece of land
back to a healthy, resilient system, it means removing a lot of
material that is out there now because it contributes to these
catastrophic fires that we are seeing across the country. Now,
it is not all that. It is that plus the conditions from
drought, the conditions from disease and insects that have
taken over in many places. California, where I came from, we
had over 160 million trees that were affected through climate
change, through disease and insect infestations, and it creates
these types of conditions wherever we go. And so that is why we
need to talk about vegetation management.
Mr. Gibbs. So are we doing any controlled burns in certain
areas where----
Mr. Moore. Yes, we certainly do controlled burns. In fact,
last year, we burned right at about 1.5 million acres totally
across the country, and we have treated about 3 million acres
across the country.
Mr. Gibbs. And just a quick question. I am out of time. But
these controlled burns, is that done while fighting a major
wildfire, or did you do controlled burns when there is not a
fire present to do the management?
Mr. Moore. I believe you may be referring to fire for
resource benefit wildfires. And do I have time to answer?
Mr. Gibbs. Go ahead and answer, yes.
Mr. Moore. So that is different, and it is one tool in the
toolbox. And we try and give that tool to the incident
commander, the IC of the fire, as well as the regional forest
and forest supervisor about making that decision about what
tool is needed. That is not a tool that we use all the time. We
only use it when the conditions warrant it and when the
conditions are right on the landscape where we can use that.
Our scientists are telling us that we do need to introduce more
fire on the landscape, but we need to do that in a way where
conditions are right to handle a fire. And in many cases, we
need to go in and do mechanical thinning on the landscape
before we put a fire on that landscape. Otherwise, you have
created a disaster.
Mr. Gibbs. Thank you.
Mr. Khanna. Thank you, Representative Gibbs.
I now want to recognize Representative Fallon.
Mr. Fallon. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I have a question for
Chief Moore. Chief, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act
included several new authorities, and that includes a CD for
fuel brakes, which applies to fuel brake projects up to 1,000
feet wide near roads, and trails, and utility lines, and
encompasses up to 3,000 acres, and an emergency situation
determination authority, which allows for salvage of dead and
dying trees, controlled harvests for insect and disease
infestations, hazardous trees, hazardous fuels rule up to
10,000 acres. Can you provide an update on how the Forest
Service intends to utilize these new authorities?
Mr. Moore. Yes, sir. Thank you, Congressman. You are right.
The bill allows a couple of things and for napalm. One of those
is a new categorical exclusion for linear fuel brakes, I
believe, what you might be referring to. So we are in the
process now of developing the guidance and send out to the
field so that we have alignment, and we have an understanding
of what we intend with this new language and these new
opportunities that we have. So we are working on that now, of
course, with the Department getting ready to send that
information out, quickly.
Mr. Fallon. Do you have a timeline, Chief? I mean, when you
say ``quickly,'' are we talking weeks, months?
Mr. Moore. Well, you know, we want to start looking at
projects this spring. And so we want to have that out before we
start the project, selection and implementation. So, you know,
I can't give you a time, but it will be the spring.
Mr. Fallon. OK, thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I yield
back.
Mr. Khanna. Thank you, Representative Fallon. And now I
would like to recognize Representative Herrell.
Ms. Herrell. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I wasn't quite ready.
Thank you, Mr. Keith Moore. It is so good to meet you in
person. We have talked on the phone, so I really appreciate it.
And this could be really your lucky day because I am listening
to you talk about some of the tools and some of the items that
you need in order to have healthy forest.
I have introduced a bill called the BIOCHAR Act, and I am
really asking you to take a look at it because what it does,
and in short, is it takes the small-diameter, low-value, ground
cover and small timber, uses it for biochar, which retains
moisture. We can use it in our ag operations for fertilizers.
So it has a lot of applications that can be beneficial but also
create jobs for these rural communities in these forests. I
grew up in the Lincoln National Forest, so I am very familiar
with this ground cover.
But I would really like for your office to look at that
because this could be an opportunity. And I thank you for
mentioning the number of trees because we have seen that where
the tree growth has been in the hundreds per acre, and what
that does to the underlying watershed is devastating,
especially for an arid state. But I also want to talk a little
bit about, and you touched on it just a little, is the
Endangered Species Act. The listings there that have really
been complicated and hard for my constituents. And especially
when it comes to like the New Mexico meadow jumping mouse or
the Lesser Prairie chicken, some of these, it doesn't feel like
there has been much interagency help or communication as it
relates to. And these are allotments. These are forest areas.
What I would like to know is, is there any way to improve
interagency communications with Fish and Wildlife, especially
at the local and regional level, to achieve a workable solution
to mitigate the impact of ESA, whether it is the jumping mouse
or the spotted owl, et cetera?
Mr. Moore. So, Congresswoman, we are always trying to find
that balance, and I am pleased to say that we do have a
wonderful relationship with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
And so your challenge, of course, we accept, to get together to
try and work through some of these concerns. Also, please
understand that under the Endangered Species Act, we are
obligated to manage for the species, to protect them, and we
are obligated through legislation by Congress, of course, and
so we will work to find that balance and how we do that. It is
so complicated when we talk about endangered species, whether
they are threatened or endangered, and when you look at how
that potentially impacts our lives as we are now, and there is
no easy answer. And a lot of times, you know, we are just in
stark disagreement with how to do that, and we have to continue
to try and work and find that balance in that discussion. But
it is a tough, tough decision.
Ms. Herrell. OK. And we would like to work with you on
that. I also know that grazing on Federal lands is both a
forest and wildlife management tool. It is also--it is an
economic necessity for rural communities, basically, especially
in the West. Are there any plans that the Forest Service has to
improve grazing access for ranches and to repopulate grazing
allotments that have been left vacant?
Mr. Moore. Yes, Congresswoman. Thank you for that question.
One of the problems we have had, I mentioned earlier, is that
we lost 40 percent, right, 40 percent of our resource
professionals, and with this bipartisan infrastructure law, we
are hopeful to start gaining some of those resources back so
that we can start addressing some of these really significant
issues we have, particularly in the West when it comes to
grazing. And so we will look forward to working with you as we
began to build our capacity internally, but also, you know,
increase our partnership levels externally.
Ms. Herrell. I appreciate that and still look forward to
seeing you in New Mexico. I know when we talked, you offered to
come out. And we would love to show you around our state and
visit with you, so we will followup with you on that. But thank
you so much for your information today. I yield back.
Mr. Khanna. Thank you, Representative Herrell. Thank you,
Chief Moore, for your testimony today and for your continued
leadership.
We have an entry, of course, ranking member of the
committee at large, Representative Comer. Let me yield to you,
Representative Comer.
Mr. Comer. Thank you, Chairman Khanna. Chief Moore, thank
you for being here today. I wanted to take a moment to discuss
with you a unit of the Forest Service in my congressional
district, Land Between the Lakes National Recreation Area, also
known as LBL. LBL has a long and unique history. As you know,
before its formation, it was home to Native Americans and known
as land between the rivers, and in the 1930's, the area was
acquired by the Department of Interior. Later, the Tennessee
Valley Authority formed the rivers into Kentucky and Barkley
Lakes for a hydroelectric dam project. This project displaced
and forcibly relocated former residents. In 1998, Congress
passed the LBL Protection Act and transferred the management of
LBL to the Forest Service.
Today, LBL is the sign of a great historical and emotional
significance for many former residents and their families in my
congressional district. Around two-thirds of the U.S.
population lives within a six-hour drive, making it one of the
most accessible national recreation areas in the U.S. It
encompasses 170,000 acres of forests and open lands and
attracts visitors from all over the world to ride ATVs, hunt
fish, boat, and simply enjoy nature.
Unfortunately, LBL has suffered from several deferred
maintenance projects and chronic understaffing. LBL has also
suffered from a shortage of law enforcement officers to cover
the extensive Federal lands. The LBL advisory board's recently
expired charter compounds these issues. This prevents the
advisory board from meeting with the Forest Service to share
their expertise on the cultural and historical context of the
area. I greatly value my constituents' and local stakeholders'
input on LBL, I trust and rely on their advice regarding what
aspects of LBL management need to be improved and appreciate
their advocacy. As the Oversight Committee, obviously we want
to ensure the Federal Government is properly managing the
Federal funding provided for the management of LBL.
So, Chief Moore, will you commit to working with the
valuable local partners and elected officials in Kentucky and
Tennessee, because it covers part of Tennessee, to ensure that
the Forest Service is efficiently managing and addressing
issues within LBL?
Mr. Moore. Yes, I would, Congressman.
Mr. Comer. Can you also commit, sir, that Federal funding
provided LBL is used to address property maintenance and
recreation projects in consultation with the advisory board and
local elected officials, as required by Federal statute?
Mr. Moore. Certainly, yes.
Mr. Comer. Well, thank you. And one of the issues that we
have had there, it is such a huge amount of land, as I
described earlier, so there are no taxes being paid to the
local government as this is Federal land. But yet, because of
the staffing shortages of law enforcement, anytime there is a
wreck or a call, there has been no Federal law enforcement
agents there. So we have had to use local law enforcement,
which is very expensive, and they don't get the tax base there
because that section is off the tax rolls. So there are
required law enforcement officer quotas for patrolling that
area that haven't been met for many, many years. So we want to
make sure that the funding is used to make sure that there is
appropriate law enforcement protection for the tourist and the
local residents of that area.
Mr. Moore. Yes, thank you for that, Congressman. Since the
last time we talked, I have looked into that, and we have made
a commitment to hire up to six additional law enforcement
personnel there. So that is completed now. Also, I committed to
send our director for law enforcement out to meet with the
locals there. That meeting has been set up, and I believe it is
somewhere around April or somewhere in there. So that is in
motion, and we now have six law enforcement personnel there on
that unit.
Mr. Comer. Great. Well, thank you very much. I look forward
to working with you on this in the future. And, Mr. Chairman, I
yield back.
Mr. Khanna. Thank you, Representative Comer. Chief Moore,
thank you for coming here today and your testimony and thank
you for your continued leadership on this important issue. The
first panel is now excused, and we will pause for a moment
while we get the second panel ready. Now I would like to
introduce our second panel witnesses.
Our first witness will be Ali Meders-Knight, who is a
traditional ecological knowledge practitioner and Mechoopda
tribal member. Our second witness will be Dominick DellaSala,
chief scientist, wild heritage, Project of Earth Island
Institute. Our third witness will be Michael Gollner, associate
professor of mechanical engineering, University of California
Berkeley. Our fourth witness is Carole King, internationally
celebrated singer, songwriter, and land conservation advocate.
Finally, we have James Hubbard, a former undersecretary for
natural resources and environment at the Department of
Agriculture.
The witnesses will all be unmuted so we can swear them in.
Please raise your right hand.
Do you swear or affirm that the testimony you are about to
give is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,
so help you God?
[A chorus of ayes.]
Mr. Khanna. Let the record show that the witnesses answered
in the affirmative. Thank you.
Without objection, your written statements will be made
part of the record.
With that, Ms. Meders-Knight, you are recognized for your
testimony.
Ms. Meders-Knight. Good morning.
Mr. Khanna. Good morning.
STATEMENT OF ALI MEDERS-KNIGHT, MECHOOPDA TRIBAL MEMBER,
TRADITIONAL ECOLOGICAL KNOWLEDGE PRACTITIONER
Ms. Meders-Knight. Members of the committee, my name is Ali
Meders-Knight. I am a basket weaver, mother of five, and the
master traditional ecological practitioner for the Mechoopda
Indian Tribe in Chico, California. I was born in Falls Church,
Virginia, which is not too far from the Capitol right now where
you are sitting, but I am indigenous to California, which is
the No. 1 economy in the whole United States and the fifth
largest economy in the entire world.
Northern California tribes rarely get credit for their role
in this very successful economy, but every bit of value from
the soil, water, timber, real estate in California's beautiful
landscape is built on the backs of thousands of years of our
ancestral presence here. Tribal tending and management set up
California's ecosystems for resilience. And this is resilience
from volcanoes, floods, droughts and, of course, wildfires. And
for 40 million years, since the Sierra Nevada Mountains were
created, California's ecosystems have been defined by extreme
destruction.
There will always be fire on this landscape. You can either
have a little bit of fire or a lot of fire, but you will never
have no fire. And over thousands of years, tribes learned how
to live in this place using fire, and harvesting and
cultivating resilience in plants, because plants are what make
us resilient. We have learned that there is good fire. There is
good smoke. Good fire and good smoke bring water in the form of
rain and sequestered carbon in the soil and make healthy plants
that have been adapted to good fire for thousands of years.
In just 180 years, colonial destruction in California's
forests, wetlands, and watersheds have re-plumbed this complex
ecological cycle to create a monopoly on water, land, and
plants as a commodity. And over 33 million acres, and out of
the over 33 million acres of forest in California, 19 million
are Federal Forests. And 70 percent, as we have heard before,
of wildfires burn on Federal lands, costing billions of dollars
of damages and Federal aid and disaster aid.
And so in 2018, the Camp Fire that destroyed Paradise,
California, started in Jarbo Gap named after Walter Jarboe, one
of the most notorious Indian killers in the state, and during
the Gold Rush, he was paid by the Federal Government to kill
over 300 natives in this area, and now his name bears the
legacy of 86 people killed at the Camp Fire. The irony of this
example is the ignorance of these legacies. Most people do not
know the history of this name, and they also do not know the
ecosystems and the conditions that led to this destruction.
Apocalyptic wildfires are spreading in California forests,
and every single fire burns on unceded tribal territory. The
BIA oversight and fraud of California's timber trust is a well-
documented theft of native land that gave timber industries
power to reshape the ecosystem. They were maintaining and they
are producing a vast amount of timber land in California and in
tribal territories. What they do is they create a lot of
density of forests with a very few species of plants. And this
is compromising not only the provisions of care and wellbeing
of tribal citizens, but this is also stepping in and the safety
and health of the United States citizens are also at risk. But
as major that disasters take place in tribal territories and in
Federal trust lands, we now have an opportunity, Nation to
nation, to invest in long-term land management. These projects
can positively impact the environment, but also positively
impact the economics in America.
To spell it out simply, tribal nations are sovereign
governments and federally recognized entities that are able to
create work force and employments on Federal lands. So when
tribes have the ability to restore lands around them through
long-term stewardship contracting, the results are outstanding.
The scope of work matters in forest management. Indigenous
methods and approaches of tending forest ecosystems have
objectives to cultivate biodiversity based on long-term place-
based observation and well-known outcomes. Biodiversity is the
presence of many species of plants, and insects, and birds that
work together in an ecosystem, and from a climate change
perspective, biodiversity is an insurance policy for
resilience. If one species is impacted, another species will
step up and take its place to keep the system going.
But contracting today in so-called forestry does not allow
for biodiversity. There is a limited amount of species, high
densities of trees, and this creates wildfire problems over and
over, decade after decade. And tribes must have self-
determination in the planning and scoping of reforestation. Our
California oak woodlands are unique to the world, adapted to
fire, floods and droughts. Their contributions to a healthy
forest are beyond measure. They hold an economy of food, seed,
and carbon that make their value superior to any monocrop
timber forest. And in Northern California, 98 percent of our
oak woodlands have been removed for the timber industry. But we
are still here, tribally led work forces certified and trained
to restore healthy forest.
We can have a huge opening in rural communities that suffer
from lack of employment and education debt. We can restore
Federal forests with fire-adapted ecosystems, trees, flowers,
and shrubs. Tribally led work forces with excellent skill sets,
including tribal knowledge is a nation-building endeavor, and
it can rightfully and effectively address climate change
solutions.
Thank you.
Mr. Khanna. Thank you very much. Now I would like to
recognize Dr. DellaSala. You are recognized.
STATEMENT OF DOMINICK DELLASALA, CHIEF SCIENTIST, WILD
HERITAGE, PROJECT OF EARTH ISLAND INSTITUTE
Mr. DellaSala. Thank you, Chairman. And my name is Dr.
Dominick DellaSala, and I am a survivor of the 2020 Almeda Fire
that destroyed half my downtown area of Talent, Oregon on the
California-Oregon border. I bring direct experience living with
wildfire and a professional background of over 300 science
publications books on climate change, wildfires, and
biodiversity. My main message to you today is you are not
hearing all the facts.
[Slide.]
Mr. DellaSala. Recent increases in wildfire activity--
please show the first slide--are driven by extreme drought, hot
temperatures, and high winds caused by climate change. The left
side of the graph is the early part of the last century when it
was hot and dry. Notice the amount of fire activity. The middle
of the graph is mid-century. There was a cool-down period
globally at the same time. Thousands, if not millions, of homes
were being built in unsafe territory. The right side shows how
climate change has been heating up the planet and the Western
part of the United States, resulting in greater fire activity.
At the same time, we now have over 40 million homes built in
unsafe terrain because they believe the Forest Service could
put out all fires, which they were doing pretty much during the
mid-part of last century during the cool down. That is no
longer the case.
[Slide.]
Mr. DellaSala. If you switch to the next slide, this graph
shows money that is being spent that is not contributing to the
solution but is contributing to the problem. So both acres
burning and expenditures in fire suppression are increasing
because the approach is to focus on the effect fire and not the
cause, climate change.
[Slides.]
Mr. DellaSala. These next slides are really going to tell
you the story of what is going on in the woods. You did not
hear that from the chief today. You will not hear that from the
minority witness. What is really happening is not some benign
activity of removing material off the landscape. These are
large trees marked in the blue paint that you see there. The
most fire-resistant materials in those forests are being logged
to pay for the removal of small trees. That is increasing the
fire hazard, not lowering it.
The slide you see on the right there are big trees that
were taken from a post-fire salvage operation. All of that
carbon that was in those trees for centuries will eventually be
released to the atmosphere, causing more of the problems that
you saw in that last graph.
The slides on the bottom--the next slide, please.
[Slide.]
Mr. DellaSala. What you see there is a forest, on the left,
in the Santa Fe Watershed. What you see on the right are so-
called restoration treatments. Those are no longer forests.
They are weed-infested fields that are going to burn hot. The
soils have been damaged by burning piles. The large trees have
been taken off the site. The fire hazards have gone up. This is
commercial timber operations on Federal lands. It is not some
sort of benign restoration treatment. It is making the
situation worse.
[Slide.]
Mr. DellaSala. And I want to switch to this next slide
because this is my hometown, and it took a day to devastate
3,000 structures in my hometown--a day. That fire had nothing
to do with lack of thinning. It went structure to structure. I
lost friends' homes, businesses that I frequented for over 20
years because all the money was being spent in the back country
on logging when the problem was these communities are not
prepared for the new climate abnormality that we are in. These
are structure-to-structure fires. The only science that we
should be doing on fire preparation is home hardening and
defensible space. That is what will get these communities
ready, not logging in the back country.
And I want to also mention I heard a lot about 70 percent
of the fires on national forests. Well that might be true.
However, the recent study at Oregon State University showed
that most of the fires impacting homes and towns like mine are
spilling over from private lands, not Federal lands. And it is
because private lands have industrial logging that interacts
with extreme fire weather that then spills over and causes the
kinds of problems that you are concerned about.
And I want to just kind of close with what I think really
needs to happen here. And first and foremost, we have got to
redirect more resources to home hardening and defensible space.
That is what will help communities like mine prepare for the
eventuality of fire. We are not going to shut the fire spigot
off. We have got to learn to coexist with it, and we have got
to treat the root cause. The root cause is climate emissions.
It is carbon pollution contributed to a large part by
commercial logging, which is the kind of activities that are
increasingly being funded to do the work that the Forest
Service did not tell you about. This is not just some benign
treatment. It is increasing carbon pollution. We are in a
climate and a biodiversity crisis. We have very little time,
precious time to solve this problem, and one of the ways you
could solve it is store more carbon in natural ecosystems like
forest, old forests, big trees.
[Slide.]
Mr. DellaSala. This last slide is what I would like to
close on because there is a lot of concern about whether, you
know, we don't have enough management, enough forest, and
whether that is contributing to the more severe fires. What you
see on the right side of that figure, and this is the largest
study ever done on this question, is that the areas that had
the most logging burned in the highest fire intensity. That is
what you see in the red bar on the right.
On the left of the figure are protected areas like national
parks, wilderness areas. They have lower amounts of high-
severity fire. And it is because those industrial log
landscapes have left fuels on the ground, the most flammable
part of the trees, the branches, the twigs, the least
flammable, the large trees have been taken off the landscape,
and that is what is giving you these big fires. You are not
going to hear that from the Forest Service, and you won't hear
that from the minority witness today.
Thank you.
Mr. Khanna. Thank you very much. Dr. Gollner, you are now
recognized.
STATEMENT OF MICHAEL GOLLNER, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF MECHANICAL
ENGINEERING, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY, DEB FACULTY
FELLOW, BERKELEY FIRE RESEARCH LAB
Mr. Gollner. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and distinguished
members of the committee. Thank you for the opportunity to
appear today to discuss opportunities to prevent future
wildfire disasters in our communities. My name is Dr. Michael
Gollner, and I am an associate professor of mechanical
engineering at the University of California-Berkeley and run
the Berkeley Fire Research Laboratory. I have over a decade of
experience carefully studying the physics of spreading
wildfires, with a particular interest in those fires that move
beyond our forests and range lands into the wildland-urban
interface, or WUI, where these fires spread from vegetation
into our community.
During my testimony, I will discuss the causes of our
current crisis, as well as solutions we have available to
safeguard our communities and preserve our natural lands. These
opinions expressed in my testimony today are my own and don't
necessarily represent the views of the University of
California.
Over the past few decades, we have seen a dramatic increase
in the frequency and severity of destructive wildfires. The
effect large wildfires have on people, lives loss, communities
destroyed, and critical natural resources wiped out is a large
part of what transforms a natural process into a human
disaster. Increasingly, large populations are affected by
wildfires even indirectly by health effects from smoke
exposure, large preventative power shut offs, and post-fire
landslides. However, wildfires are a natural process that have
occurred across our landscapes for millennia. Indigenous
peoples utilize fire as an important cultural practice and
resource management tool. Starting in the early 1900's, a
series of large wildfires pressed the Federal Government to
eradicate fires from our forests. By suppressing every small
fire, we left a massive buildup of fuels that is less resilient
to change and has, therefore, led to more severe wildfires in
long term.
Climate change has further exacerbated this crisis, leading
to prolonged droughts and severe fire weather conditions, and
is only projected to get worse. Increasing development in the
wild and urban interface means an increasing number of
residents are now threatened during these events. While
wildfires will always occur, wildfire disasters are preventable
when the right strategies are applied before a fire begins.
Focusing on better management of our landscape, including
adding prescribed fire, reducing hazardous fuels near
communities, and allowing some fires to burn under mild
conditions, will lower the intensity of fires our communities
are exposed to. There are many challenges here as there is
always some risk from a fire, even under controlled conditions.
There is often public backlash from reducing fuels and
landscapes, significant regulatory hurdles, local smoke
exposure, and the above-mentioned risk from any fire. But
without this, we will be forced to contend only with the most
extreme fire events on our landscapes. While fuels management
is a critical practice necessary to preserve our forests, this
alone is not sufficient to prevent disasters within our
communities. We must work to make it harder for these fires to
spread into and within urban areas.
The recent Marshall Fire outside of Boulder, Colorado,
burned through grass, middle of winter, but still destroyed
over 1,000 homes, highlighting this is not solely a forest
management problem. Mitigation was focused on structures and
critical infrastructure alongside fuel treatments.
Modifications to homes can be made to prevent ignition from
embers, such as screens on vents, non-combustible building
materials, and constant maintenance, removing flammable litter.
This is often called hardening. Defensible space can also help
fires keep from getting close enough to ignite structures and
give firefighters a safe place to protect those structures as a
fire approaches.
Our understanding of how fire spread into it within
communities is improving, but there are still many unanswered
questions. Small flying embers have been recognized by
investigations by NIST and the U.S. Forest Service as key
mechanisms of spread from wildfires into communities, but much
of this understanding is still in its infancy, from sprinklers
to home spacing. We know there could be more improvements here
but struggle to quantify the best designs possible. Most deaths
occur while people are evacuating fires. However, little
attention has been paid to evacuation and notification.
Despite the incredible importance and potential lifesaving
outcomes of this research, the U.S. still lacks the necessary
dedicated infrastructure to test buildings against wildfire
exposure. Dedicated research facilities, multidisciplinary
centers of excellence, sustained support, and interagency
coordination are still needed in this area. If we could develop
minimally invasive ways to retrofit existing structures and
communities and incentivize these changes to happen, we could
potentially make a widespread change, saving lives while
minimizing costs.
Implementing these recommendations on a broad scale is a
challenge that takes extensive cooperation between residents,
first responders, private industry, and public policymakers.
Federal grants and support could play a large role in
increasing the capacity of these local programs to implement
changes that ultimately will prevent disaster.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Khanna. Thank you very much. Ms. King, you are
recognized.
STATEMENT OF CAROLE KING, CELEBRATED SINGER-SONGWRITER, LAND
CONSERVATION ADVOCATE
Ms. King. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Madam Chairman, Ranking
Member Norman, and Mr. Gibbs. I am a 44-year resident of Idaho.
For 38 years, I lived in a rural county where my nearest
neighbor was a national forest. I have been an advocate for the
Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act for 32 years because
it was bold and visionary in protecting species and habitat on
a large scale. Later, I learned that a forest also stores
carbon, which is what we need to solve the climate crisis and
address fires, so NREPA is also a climate solution. Coal, oil,
and gas get a lot of attention, but logging is also a huge
emitter of carbon, and taxpayers have been subsidizing
clearcutting in our national forests under multiple presidents
from both parties for decades. It is institutional.
The Forest Service loses nearly $2 billion a year on timber
sales, yet they continue to facilitate felling mature trees
under the guise of Orwellian euphemisms: ``thinning,'' ``fuel
reduction,'' ``salvage management,'' and the ever-popular
``restoration,'' and I learned a new one today, ``fuel
breaks.'' In the United States, annual emissions from logging
are comparable to the amount emitted from coal, and most
commercial logging is now mechanized. So it is not about jobs
because a single operator of heavy equipment, called a feller
buncher, can saw through a living tree, strip the branches, and
set the former tree on a pile of logs in little more than the
time it took me just to tell you this. Note the size of the big
trees and the trees in Dr. DellaSala's slide. They are not
thinning.
Before the infrastructure law was enacted, more than 200
independent scientists--independent--wrote a letter asking
House Committee chairs to remove the logging provisions from
that law. Their data led them to write that thinning can often
increase fire intensity, while protected forests are more
likely to lower the intensity should a fire occur. When humans
manage a forest, they often clear cut, leaving the unprofitable
parts to dry out. Clear cuts are tinderboxes. You can see that
on the slide. Logging emits eight times more CO2 per acre than
the combination of wildfire and insects combined. Forest
degradation accelerates climate change, yes wildfires are
getting worse, not because we have too many trees, but because
of extreme climate-driven weather events accelerated by removal
of trees. Trees store carbon.
Independent scientists not funded by the Forest Service or
companies that profits from logging tell us that the most
effective way to protect homes is to harden them with fire-
resistant materials and create defensible space. When other
scientists promote removing trees beyond 100-feet from a home
or a community, which logging companies do, the headline
becomes 'scientists disagree.'' This confuses the public. Let
me clear up the confusion. When a scientist tells you that the
solution is to remove even more trees from our national
forests, look for who is paying that scientist.
I am asking Congress to do four things: pass NREPA, pass a
law requiring the Forest Service to incentivize preservation
over timber sales, repeal the logging provisions in the
infrastructure law, allocate some of that money to help people
harden homes and use the rest to help American families. Look,
I know it is not easy to overcome decades of timber industry
influence, money, and misinformation, but our kids and
grandkids are calling us to action. We need to take action.
I want to thank this subcommittee for the chance to educate
members and the public. If you don't know, now you know. Thank
you.
Mr. Khanna. Thank you, Ms. King.
I now want to recognize Undersecretary Hubbard for your
testimony. Undersecretary Hubbard?
Mr. Hubbard. Yes, thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Khanna. Go ahead.
Mr. Hubbard. All right. I will.
STATEMENT OF JAMES HUBBARD, FORMER UNDER SECRETARY, NATURAL
RESOURCES AND ENVIRONMENT, DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE
Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and members of the committee. I am
here today as a retired individual, so I am only representing
myself, and I am only offering you what I learned over 50 years
of dealing with these issues.
You are hearing a lot of perspectives on the issue, a lot
of different elements of the issue. All of that factors into
the decisions that need to be made, but when I try to approach
what can be done, what is reasonable, it comes down to what is
driving this. Well, what is driving it is clearly the forest
condition, and it is a major factor. Yes, it is complicated by
the weather. The less precipitation, the higher temperature,
the lower humidity. That is something we are experiencing. But
during my time working, I would debrief the 17 Type 1 incident
commanders each year that went out to fight fire. This Type 1
was our highest level. These are individuals that have 25, 30
years of experience at this, and what has been happening the
last 10 years is that during those debriefings I would hear
from them, ``we have never seen anything like this before.''
So things have changed, and what can we do about it? There
are a lot of things that could contribute to it, but what can
the Forest Service, what can the land management agencies do
about it? Change the condition. That, I advocate, requires
active management. There are all kinds of forms of active
management and choices to be made as to what options you pick.
I also believe in the science that is available, that we can
change fire behavior by changing the forest condition. And I
think what we do and where we do it is important, and those are
decisions that have to be made in a collaborative way. I don't
think the Forest Service or any agency should make those
decisions on their jurisdictions by themselves.
The scale of this problem is across the landscape and, yes,
defensible space near community is important. Hardening the
community is important. I don't know what the Forest Service
can do about some of that because it is not on Federal land, so
everybody has to be a player in this if it is going to be
successful. Fire spreads oftentimes from the forest to near the
community, to within the community, and home-to-home, so it is
everybody that is involved in those jurisdictions. And I would
advocate those jurisdictions have to collaborate, and they have
to have a unified approach that they all agreed to. That won't
happen everywhere. A lot of times the disagreements will lead
to ``we are not ready for this.'' If they are not ready for
this, there is not a lot of change that can be accomplished.
What Congress has provided over the years is increments of
policy that contribute to a solution. The infrastructure bill
provided an influx of funding that gave a shot in the arm to
the Forest Service. Forest Service has now developed a plan
that the chief described as to how they are going to go forward
in implementing this. Prioritization and strategic long term
has to be a part of that. Where people are ready to address the
risk and where they can address the risk, which is not
everywhere, there are places on the land that we won't touch
with active management activity. We may touch it with the use
of fire, like in the wilderness. So all kinds of options, but
those have to be chosen and everybody has to agree to what
those are.
I thank you for letting me appear, and I am happy to
discuss anything I said and what I didn't say.
Mr. Khanna. Thank you, Undersecretary Hubbard, for your
testimony.
I now recognize myself for five minutes of questioning.
To make up for decades of over-aggressive fire suppression
and the effects of climate change on U.S. forests, the Forest
Service and Department of Interior carry out prescribed burns
and thinning treatments to reduce the amount of combustible
fuel in forests. Dr. DellaSala, you testified that logging
projects can affect wildfire severity. You also heard Chief
Moore's testimony that he was saying they don't really remove
the big trees in ways that are harmful. What do you say in
terms of the thinning? Are they doing it consistent with the
science, or is it your view that they are doing certain things
that are making the situation worse?
Mr. DellaSala. Yes, thank you for that question. I guess to
simplify my response, I would say this. The Forest Service has
been in charge of a lot of this research. This would be like
putting the coal industry in charge of climate change research.
This would be like putting the tobacco industry in charge of
lung cancer research. They cherry pick the data. They don't
provide any kind of research that disagrees with their
position. Normally that is shunted aside. It is not considered.
They do what is called categorical exclusions, which bypass
NREPA so you don't get protection of those big trees. You get
large swaths of so-called hazard tree removal along roads,
salvage operations, which take out those big trees you saw in
my photos after fire. All that carbon eventually goes into the
atmosphere. They don't protect the big trees.
Thinning is hardly ever described as what it really means.
It is not defined. Active management can mean anything. It can
mean anything, bypassing NREPA, bypassing the Endangered
Species Act, by passing the Clean Water Act. These are not
benign activities. I wish they were. I wish they were targeting
the small trees that Mr. Norman referred to as thatch, but that
is not really what happens in these so-called thinning
operations. They take the most fire-resistant large trees to
pay for the timber sale, and they have to come back every 10 or
15 years because the vegetation grows back. And so they don't
do that because they can't pay for the timber sale because took
out the big trees in the first go round.
So I just want to emphasize that what the Forest Service is
doing is making this situation worse. They are as bad as the
coal industry is making our climate worse because a lot of what
the chief was talking about--new markets--referred to biomass
utilization of the small material. And we know that a lot of
those biomass plants in the Southeast, for instance, are
located down the airsheds of communities of color, of
disadvantaged people, of people that have health problems. You
talk a lot about smoke. A real problem with that small material
is it is being manufactured into bio pellets that are burned as
so-called clean renewable energy, and it is affecting down
airshed people of color in the South that are having to deal
with increased pollution in their airsheds as a benign thinning
activity. So I really don't think you are getting the full
picture from what you heard today.
Mr. Khanna. Thank you. Dr. Gollner, I want to bring you in.
Do you believe that there is any harm caused when thinning
removes large trees, and if so, what is that harm? And then,
because my time is running out, I just want Ms. King to
explain, you know, Ms. King, you have so many things you have
done. Where does your passion for this issue come from? And can
you talk about the importance for communities and homes to
invest in defensible space for wildfires? Maybe we will have
Dr. Gollner and then Ms. King.
Mr. Gollner. Thanks, Chairman. I would start by saying, you
know, I am not a forestry expert in the field, but what I
understand from fire behavior as a fire behavior expert is that
we are primarily interested in removing, I believe as a
representative said earlier, the thatch and the smaller fuels
on the ground. Those are the fuels we often call ladder fuels,
which then spread fires into the crown and increase fire
behavior, and it is these smaller fuels that often drive fire
behavior. And so, a great way to remove them is often
prescribed burning.
There may be some mechanical means necessary to get a
forest in a state to where prescribed burning can be
introduced, and that is one of the tools in a toolbox that
scientists research and that fire managers and the Forest
Service need to consider. I believe that it was said earlier
there are large number of scientists at the U.S. Forest
Service, Department of Interior, and elsewhere that work on
these problems and have a range of advice. I am a little
disturbed by what we saw in some of the earlier photos, and it
certainly doesn't represent the type of forest management that
I would envision as being good. We want to remove those smaller
fuels that are driving fire behavior. Thank you.
Mr. Khanna. Thank you. Ms. King?
Ms. King. Not sure which button. I guess this is the
button. OK. You asked about how I got my passion for this. As I
mentioned, I lived right next to a wild forest. It was not
protected at the time. It is now wilderness as part of the
bill. I don't know what it was called. I think the Boulder-
White Clouds Wilderness Bill. And I don't live there anymore,
but for 38 years, I got to observe the natural forest
processes, and one of the things that was mentioned was the
insects. When I lived there, a lot of the time, I don't
remember what years, but the pine bark beetle turned whole
hillsides into what we called grey trees because the needles
were dead and they appeared grey, and they were that nobody
took them out. Nobody did anything with them. They either fell
down, but they provided so much habitat for woodpeckers, for
the beetles which other species eat. I got to see so many
species interact, and that became really important to me.
As far as fires, we didn't know at the time, where I lived,
on the ranch where I lived, it was long cabins. We didn't know
about defensible space, but we created it anyway. It made
common sense. We created it around the homes. We didn't need to
go into the forest. And Dr. DellaSala speaks about the science,
but from personal experience, the forest has taken care of
itself for so long. And when you talk about managing a forest
that is a euphemism for logging. They go in and they take these
trees. All these euphemisms deal with how they can persuade the
public, that this is good and right.
Mr. Khanna. Thank you, Ms. King. And I want to recognize
our ranking member, Ranking Member Norman, for your five
minutes of questioning.
Mr. Norman. Thank you, Chairman. Thank each one of you. I
enjoyed our meeting yesterday. I see your passion. Ms. King,
you mentioned hardening of the houses. What is the cost of
that? Do you know?
Ms. King. I don't. I don't. I am about to do some of it,
but I don't know. I am going to replace my roof. I live in town
now. The roof has a cedar shake. It is made of cedar shakes,
so.
Mr. Norman. OK.
Ms. King. It is pretty expensive, and some people who live
in the wildland-urban interface can't afford it. Some can, and
that is why I am saying instead of paying so the timber
companies can go in and log, allocate some of that money to
help folks who need the money.
Mr. Norman. So I am asking, do you recommend that the
taxpayers to pay for the hardening of the private houses?
Ms. King. Where it is in communities, where they don't have
the resources to do it, yes, I think that would be appropriate.
And you could reroute some of the funds that are going to
subsidize logging.
Mr. Norman. OK. And you are against any kind of logging?
Ms. King. I am not against any kind. I used to be like, oh,
go ahead and log in the multiple use areas of the forest, but
now that we have a carbon climate crisis, I don't think we
should log in our national forest. We can't tell people what to
do on private land. They are going to do it. That is fine, and
there is plenty of it too, but in our national forest, we need
to preserve them.
Mr. Norman. OK. I mean, we have houses being built out of
wood. We have paper being manufactured because of wood. The
Federal lands have got great trees that can be thinned, that
can be used other than just letting it go, and I understand
your opinion. Mr. DellaSala, you mentioned yesterday that the
planet has got 12 years to, am I right, to exist? Would you
expand on that?
Mr. DellaSala. I don't think I said to exist, but I enjoyed
our visit yesterday, by the way. Thank you for taking the time.
And what I said was the latest study, the study that were
published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,
gave us a accelerated warning. They said that time was running
short. We had about 10 years to transition out of burning
fossil fuels into clean renewable energy in order to keep the
parts per million in the atmosphere, carbon dioxide, close to
350 million. So if you think of that as kind of the safety
network, 350 is what most scientists are saying that is where
we need to be. We are at about 417 right now, so we are this
far off of that safety net.
The further away we get from that, the more extreme we are
going to see climate change events, including super hurricanes,
including megafires, sea-level rise affecting mainly coastal
populations, the permafrost melting, affecting mostly Alaska
native communities that have to relocate. I mean, we are
talking about major, major global disruptions like we have
never seen before. And no one knows exactly when that is going
to happen, but the further away from that safety net we get by
burning fossil fuels and deforestation and forest degradation,
the more severe those impacts are going to be.
Mr. Norman. Where does--and in 12 years, if we stay like we
are now, what is going to happen?
Mr. DellaSala. We are going to see more extreme events like
what we have been getting and more frequent. Mega droughts are
now happening in the Southwest. We are seeing the largest sheet
of ice breaking off of the Antarctic continent right now. When
that happens, it could be as a little as 3 to 5 years. It could
be a little longer. That is going to accelerate sea-level rise.
There are billions of people living in coastal areas that at
some point are going to have to relocate.
Mr. Norman. I guess, where does this rank in the priorities
that this country has as far as dealing with China, dealing
with the genocide, dealing with our debt, dealing with all the
issues America face? Where does climate change and what you are
talking about take priority--top, bottom, middle?
Mr. DellaSala. They are all important. They are all
important.
Mr. Norman. You can't pay for so many. How would you fund,
too, for what you are talking about? I assume it doesn't
include any gas or any what the President is doing now: no gas,
no oil exploration, pretty much just cutting everything off.
Mr. DellaSala. I didn't say that, but I think it would have
been great if Congress could have passed the Build Back Better
Act because there was a lot of funding in there to help
accelerate innovation in renewable clean energy sources. And I
just want to maybe underscore this, one impression I took away
from our meeting yesterday is, like me, you have got grandkids,
and I am worried about my grandkids. I have got two daughters
that I love very much. I have got three grandkids that are
toddlers, and when they are adults, I worry about the planet
that we are leaving them, and I know you care about your
grandkids too. And in the long run, that is really the
priority, isn't it, our families?
Mr. Norman. Our families, and you and I have the same
passion for protecting them. But as far as where we go with our
national issues that we are facing now with socialism,
communism coming, and with this Administration doing what it is
doing to this country, it is a crying shame. Thank you so much.
Mr. DellaSala. You bet.
Mr. Norman. I yield back.
Mr. Khanna. Thank you, Ranking Member.
I now want to recognize our chair, Chair Maloney.
Chairwoman Maloney. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And, Mr.
Chairman, the logging industry spends millions of dollars every
year trying to influence lawmakers, Congress, and the public,
trying to convince us that chopping down trees is good and
right. They use buzzwords like ``the truth about logging.'' I
would like to ask our witnesses about some of the industry's
favorite terms. Ms. King, does the log industry use the word
``thinning'' to mean chopping down trees?
Ms. King. That is what happens, yes.
Chairwoman Maloney. And how about do they use the term
``hazardous fuel reduction'' to mean chopping down trees?
Ms. King. Yes.
Chairwoman Maloney. Can ``fire risk reduction'' mean
chopping down trees?
Ms. King. Yes.
Chairwoman Maloney. And what about ``active forest
management?'' Can this be another term for chopping down trees?
Ms. King. Yes. And there are so many of those, you know,
reforestation, vegetation management, forest health. What they
end up doing is they go in, and whatever it is they say they
are going to do; they log more. And as has been pointed out,
they take the most profitable trees, which are the big ones,
and then they leave all the branches on the ground to dry out,
which exacerbates fires. And in Montana, for example, you know,
we didn't include the photo, but there is a photo of a huge
clear cut, and then behind it are mountains with many, like,
bald spots. And you just look at them and you just go, where is
our forest? What are they doing? And it is all justified by
these euphemisms. So definitely, that is a thing that they do
to persuade the public.
Chairwoman Maloney. Well, the industry may call this
``managed forest,'' or an example of fire risk reduction, or
any of the other terms you used, but to me, it looks like a
forest that was cleared for profit, plain and simple. And we
have collaborated very closely to pass the Northern Rockies
Ecosystem Protection Act. And I would like to ask you, why do
you believe wilderness bills like NREPA or the Northern Rockies
Ecosystem Protection Act are better paths forward for so-called
commercial logging?
Ms. King. I can't say I am not against. I don't have an
opinion on commercial logging on private land. In our national
forest, we own them. Your constituents paid for the subsidies
that are in the infrastructure law, and every state's
constituents pay for that, and we should not be paying for
that. Preservation--right now, preservation is the solution. It
is, like, 30 by 30, is a big deal, and that is one way that we
can mitigate climate change. That means leave the forest alone.
And that is why the Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act
is so important because it protects 23 million acres of wild
intact ecosystems, forest ecosystems. And there is an
interaction, like I mentioned, about the pine bark beetles and
the trees that leave them standing. And if they burn, that is
the forest's way of taking care of itself. So, I mean, I could
go on, but.
Ms. Meders-Knight. Excuse me. I think it is important to--
--
Chairwoman Maloney. Reclaiming my time. Reclaiming my time.
The logging industry wants us to believe it shares our desires
for safe communities and healthy forests, but I think they
should stop misleading the public and start telling the truth
about what is responsible thinning can amount to chopping down
trees. And I would like to say that I support President Biden's
directive, his executive order to protect 30 percent of the
land by 2030. That is going to help our environment. That is
going to really help it for our children and our grandchildren,
as many of you said. And preserving forest will also advance
our efforts to combat the climate crisis by locking carbon in
the ground. This hearing starts the conversation to get to the
truth of what the industry is up to.
I look forward to the committee's continued efforts to make
sure the logging industry understands that public land belongs
to the public, today, tomorrow, and in the future, and the best
way we can preserve it is to literally preserve it. And that is
why I support the Green New Deal, and NREPA, and every law,
effort of anybody, to preserve our public land for public use,
public enjoyment, and that is by preserving it.
I thank all the witnesses for their insightful statements.
I wish I had time to question everybody, but I now yield back.
My time has expired. I thank the Chairman for holding this
committee meeting and for his leadership in this area. I yield
back.
Mr. Khanna. Thank you, Madam Chair. Before we go to
Representative Tlaib, Ms. Meders-Knight, did you want to say
something?
Ms. Meders-Knight. Yes, I do want to say something. I think
it is important to get an indigenous perspective. Everywhere
you are in the United States, you are on someone's indigenous
territory. There is native territory everywhere in United
States, and every forest and every personal property is native
territory. Now, we were talking about terms attending and
managing land. I don't think that we literally want to say that
``wilderness'' is a colonial term, ``management'' is a colonial
term. If you are deeply colonized, you are not going to really
have any understanding on how to tend a forest. You are
colonial. You only know what you know based on the programming
of being an American and not interacting in the forest as a
part of it, as part of the forest ecosystem.
So it is really important to understand the terms that we
are throwing out about tending to a forest, or managing a
forest, doing those things. There are indigenous terms of
working in a forest for thousands of years that even some song
singer, writer, that is just looking at the forest cannot
testify to because they do not know these terms as an actual
act of forest tender. So for us to understand that, let me just
leave it right here. In our language, we don't have a word for
``wild'' because we are indigenous. We live in this landscape
for thousands of years. We don't have a word for ``wild,'' so
there is no world ``wilderness.'' We tend to everything because
everything is home. Thank you.
Chairwoman Maloney. Thank you.
Mr. Khanna. Thank you. Representative Tlaib, you are
recognized.
Ms. Tlaib. Well, thank you so much, Chairman. I think my
question is to someone that can answer, and this really is a
sincere question about how much do we subsidize. Is it $2
billion that we subsidize for private companies to destroy, cut
down our trees on our lands? Is it around that much? I don't
know who can answer that question.
Ms. King. I can answer it. Just I can't break it down as to
how much of it literally goes to logging, but I am guessing
that most of it does go to logging--by the other names. Yes, I
had somebody tell me, oh, we are putting in lot of money for
restoration. Restoration is one of those euphemisms, so it is--
--
Ms. Tlaib. No, I think, Ms. King, what my struggle, as I
was listening to this, I wasn't planning on asking a question.
And I am really just distraught that you were talking about
being able to protect people's homes, where they live, and who
is going to pay for it. I am wondering who is paying right now
for the subsidies? Who is paying----
Ms. King. Taxpayers. Everybody.
Ms. Tlaib. That is right. So we are basically subsidizing,
or I don't know. I hate that word because Americans, we are
basically paying people to make money off of destroying our
land. And from what I understand and what I have read in the
past is U.S. forestry loses money every year, millions of
dollars every year because of that. Is that correct?
Ms. King. Yes, $2 billion a year. That is an Economist
study that I have looked at.
Ms. Tlaib. And so I think it is really important that when
we talk about who is going to pay for things that we also talk
in consensus, who is paying for this now, who is paying for the
destruction now, and it sounds like the American people are.
And that is unfortunate because I think many would agree that
that is not where they want the money spent, especially on for-
profit entities that, again, are destroying land.
You know, it is really hard, as someone that lives in
frontline communities, that, you know, for many of my
residents, we really don't feel seen or heard when much of
these discussions are held. And it really does matter when we
hear folks say who is going to pay for things, as we have seen
the fact that we are paying for pollution in communities like
mine. We are paying for dirty water, dirty air. And in this
essence, as we center around the destruction of our lands
across our Nation, that it is the American people that need to
be aware that is who is paying for it. So when community and
folks are actually coming to the table and saying, look, we
need your help, because what you all are doing is destroying
our livelihood that we are hesitating and asking who is going
to pay for it. And so, I just wanted to be able to say that
Chairman. Thank you so much for allowing me to do that, even
though I wasn't scheduled to, and I really sincerely appreciate
the panelists.
And Ms. Meders-Knight, that is why you are here. I want you
to know I hear you, and I will yield a minute or so that I have
left for anything that you think any of my colleagues need to
hear about the impact on our Native-American and our indigenous
communities.
Ms. Meders-Knight. Yes, I wanted to talk about the 2018
Camp Fire, and when we live in this area, all of that took
place in our Mechoopda tribal territory. And Tetra Tech was a
major corporation that was able to move in and get all the
funding, the contracted funding, the tree removal, hazard tree,
everything. We had local groups and local community members
that we all got trained. And then I created a training program
through the Mechoopda Indian Tribe to train folks on how to
manage not only forest health, but how to do wetlands, how to
do meadows, and these are what would be considered fire breaks.
So I have to use language that is used by the timber
industry and also by the forest industry, but I have a unique
language of my own as a traditional ecological knowledge
practitioner. And I have been doing this for 20 years, and I
usually teach children because children are actually way more
open-minded than Congress. And so what I am really telling you
is that the management of these Federal forests really need to
be done in cooperation with every tribal nation in the United
States. You have a lot of hands-on deck, and you have a lot of
economic investments in each of those tribal territories that
allow for work force development. These work force development
can also hire and train non-native folks to work in the area. I
think it is really important to strive to have work force
development when we are coming into this discussion instead of
any other finger pointing. But I also think that we also have
to understand the terms that I use also because I need to
cross-reference between the colonial world and the world that I
live in today.
Mr. Khanna. Thank you. Representative Ocasio-Cortez?
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. You so much, Chair Khanna. You know, so
many of these principles that we are discussing today, whether
it is directly confronting the realities of climate change,
land use, creating high-paying jobs in order to protect our
public lands, advocacy for indigenous sovereignty, all of these
things are core Green New Deal tenets. But I want us to zoom
out a little bit because when we were first drafting the Green
New Deal and many other pieces of environmental legislation,
very often there were so many folks, well-meaning, well-
intentioned deeply studied, that said it makes no sense to
consider issues of justice and injustice with decarbonizing our
economy. And they said, we need to stick to the science of the
problem and worry about all of the injustice stuff later or
separately. And I think it is important for us to take the
opportunity, Ms. Meders-Knight, to actually discuss how
injustice and colonization is part of what has led us to this
climate crisis today.
In 2021, the United States experienced record-breaking
wildfires, like the Dixie wildfire in California that burned
nearly 1 million acres of land, an area larger than New York
City, Chicago, Dallas, and Los Angeles combined. Millions of
acres of land across the United States were once indigenous,
and we now call them national parks. And we know that there is
so much of the indigenous stewarding and practices that were
going on for millennia, including the controlled deliberate
burns that cleared out dead underbrush without catching fire to
taller trees.
Now, Ms. Meders-Knight, what are some of the benefits of
native controlled burns to the ecosystem and overall land?
Ms. Meders-Knight. You are going to have carbon
sequestration, carbon stored into the soil. You are going to
have healthy fire-adaptive plants, and you are going to have a
thriving ecosystem that has lots of biodiversity, which is
natural selection, natural mortality that is chosen by the
fire.
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. And, Ms. Meders-Knight, despite the
benefits that you just outlined, when the United States
forcibly displaced Native-American tribes, Federal fire policy
then banned native-controlled, millennia-long burning practices
that took care for the land, and instead promoted explicit fire
suppression designed to protect watersheds and commercial
timber supplies. Is that correct?
Ms. Meders-Knight. Yes. They also prohibited our cultural
practices up until the 1970's, and cultural burning is one of
those prohibited practices that was part of our ceremony and
part of our lifestyle.
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. So up until the 1970's, the colonization
and the displacement of indigenous peoples in the United States
included banning a practice that we now know explicitly
sequestered carbon. And would you say that it is fair to say,
Ms. Meders-Knight that the colonization of indigenous peoples
in the United States and the consequences of that have
contributed to carbon emissions?
Ms. Meders-Knight. Contributed immensely.
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. So is it accurate to say as well that
when controlled burning was banned over decades, the land grew
thick then with vegetation and it dried out every summer,
essentially creating huge kindling stocks for extreme and even
more devastating forest fires than otherwise?
Ms. Meders-Knight. As well as that, they also included
planting acres and acres of non-native conifers that don't
belong in that ecosystem to put on top of that fire hazard as
well.
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. So as was covered earlier in this
hearing, the Federal Government has authorized the Forest
Service and the Bureau of Land Management to conduct
stewardship contracts to do a number of things, but they have
actually contracted many corporations to sell timber instead of
more straightforwardly stewarding the land, correct?
Ms. Meders-Knight. It is called goods for services, yes.
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. And what are some of the proposals, and
what are some of the ideas that you would recommend the
committee entertain in order to right that wrong?
Ms. Meders-Knight. It goes directly to the goods for
services and expand it to be more complementary and applicable
to a economy that is placed based in that area. Say, for
instance, California has acorns. We also have a limited amount
of native seeds to reseed or re-vegetate these burn scars. And
so it is really important to create these seed banks because
that becomes the capital that is in all of your Federal forest
that is shared between tribes. It is focusing on the capital of
goods for services. And those goods can be seeds, those
products can be food, and those products can be sequestered
carbon as well as food that is also brought up, the floor that
is processed in each, I would say, in each area. So a lot of
stuff that comes off of a forest floor on the Pacific Coast
will be different than the East Coast, but, of course, those
products are goods for services that the tribe knows how to
procure.
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. Thank you.
Mr. Khanna. Thank you. And now I would like to recognize
Representative Krishnamoorthi.
Mr. Krishnamoorthi. Hey, thank you, Chair Khanna. This is a
terrific hearing, and I would like to direct a couple questions
to Carole King. Ms. King, thank you so much for visiting my
office with your colleagues to explain kind of background on
the particular issues that we are talking about today. I guess
the first question I wanted to ask you is, would you like to
say anything that you haven't had a chance to share up to this
point in this hearing?
Ms. King. Well, I think I want to say, highlight the fact.
Again, so many people talk about their concern for climate,
which is so overwhelming, the figures that Dr. DellaSala gave,
like, how over what we are supposed to be we already are. But
the focus has been on coal, oil, gas as part of the problem,
and emissions. But I just want people to really recognize that
we are logging in our national forest at a rate equal to the
emissions from burning coal, that logging needs to be part of
the discussion and more than just discussion. I think that is
the main point I wanted to get across.
And the other is the misuse of our Federal funds going to
subsidized, subsidized, pay-for. We are paying for the roads
that go in and for the logging, all the damage to our forest.
We need to reroute that money to help people harden homes that
cannot afford to do it, and to protect communities like the
ones that Representative Ocasio-Cortez spoke about and that
Representative Tlaib also spoke about.
Mr. Krishnamoorthi. Ms. King, what if I am an individual at
home and I am watching this hearing, and I am just thinking,
gosh, I don't see how I could do anything to help, one person
can't make a difference, what would you say to that, and what
would you tell them to do?
Ms. King. That is a great question because that applies to
every issue that everybody cares about. People need to become
involved, and more important even than becoming involved, or
equally important, is become informed. And don't just get your
information from one source. Use critical thinking. Look at
what is being said, and who is saying it and why, and who is
paying whom to say it, and I think that is what I would say to
people certainly about this issue. When you hear the
scientists, don't just say, oh, I am confused. You know, really
dig, take a moment or two to just like, say, OK, I am going to
look past my usual source of information. Politics matter. You
don't have to run, although if you want to, you should. But
people should just be more involved because it is life for us.
It is how our lives are going to be, how your life is going to
be, how your family's life is going to be.
Mr. Krishnamoorthi. I think that running for office is
terrific, and running for Congress is terrific. Just please
don't do it in the 8th Congressional District of Illinois,
please. But apart from that, we would be delighted. Let me ask
you another question, which is, tell us a good news story, a
story of what a community or city, municipality, a state, or
even a country has done with regard to the issues at hand and
what can we learn from that list.
Ms. King. Well, I am in trouble thinking of a good news
story on this. I would perhaps ask my colleague here, my
panelists, my fellow panelists.
Mr. Krishnamoorthi. Yes, sure. Please jump in.
Mr. DellaSala. Well, I got a couple of examples because I
work around the globe on forest issues, that Costa Rica has a
thriving economy that is based on ecotourism, and they have
saved about 25 percent of their tropical rainforest, and it is
driving their economy. We could do the very same thing. And one
thing I wanted to share with the subcommittee is we have got
these new numbers that we are going to be publishing soon based
on the largest inventory of mature and old forest across the
United States. We have got the first map and nationwide
inventory of how much of these forests are left, and what we
are seeing is that the ability of those forests to store carbon
is massive. We have some of the most carbon-dense forests on
the planet. They are storing the equivalent of eight times the
U.S. global emissions.
Now, we got to get off the fossil fuels. We have talked
about that. The President also at the COP26 signed a pledge to
deforestation and global forest degradation. Lead by example.
We have an opportunity to lead by example to the international
community, so we become that beacon of light, that beacon of
hope that we need to get through this climate and biodiversity
crisis that the planet is in right now. So I would like to get
our Nation into that leadership position, and I am very pleased
to hear what I heard today. I am sorry Representative Ocasio-
Cortez left. I wanted to thank her for the Green New Deal and
all the work that she is doing in that regards. I want to thank
the Chairwoman as well for mentioning 30 by 30. That is an
extraordinary pledge that hasn't come to fruition yet, and we
have got to get there as soon as possible so that we are the
world's leader, leadership on conservation and climate change,
because our forests are a natural climate solution to the
crisis.
Mr. Krishnamoorthi. Thank you. I yield back.
Mr. Khanna. Thank you. It looks like we have had the
members who wish to ask questions. In closing, I want to thank
our panelists for their remarks, and I want to commend my
colleagues for participating in this important conversation. I
want to thank our chair again for helping convene and give us
the impetus to have this hearing, and all of the panelists for
your passion, your testimony. I know it will make a big
difference. And we will be following up with the Forest
Management Service as we got a commitment from Chief Moore to
meet with everyone and make sure all the perspectives are
considered.
With that, without objection, all members will have five
legislative days within which to submit additional written
question for witnesses to the chair, which will be forwarded to
the witnesses for their response. I ask our witnesses to please
respond as promptly as you are able.
Mr. Khanna. This hearing is now adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 12:27 p.m., the subcommittee was adjourned.]
[all]