[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 92 (Wednesday, June 7, 1995)]
[House]
[Pages H5686-H5687]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


              THE TIMBER AMENDMENT IN THE RESCISSIONS BILL

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from North Carolina [Mr. Taylor] is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. TAYLOR of North Carolina. Madam Speaker, today the President of 
the United States vetoed the rescission bill that had been worked on 
for many weeks in this Congress by the House and the Senate and then in 
conference, and in that rescission package were many things that I 
think are important to the Nation, but one thing that was very 
important for forest health was the timber salvage amendment. The 
salvage amendment called for increasing forest health by allowing and 
actually requiring the Forest Service to get rid of the large portion 
of the dead and dying and deceased timber in our national forests.
  We have several problems in the national forests. First of all there 
have been billions of board feet, there are somewhere between 20 and 30 
billion board feet that are dead and dying in the forest that need to 
be taken out. The dead trees in the West are accumulating so fast that 
forest fires are not only burning along the ground as they once did, 
they are now burning to high degrees because of the buildup of dead and 
dying timber that has already accumulated in the forests. They reach 
temperatures of over 2000 degrees. They bake the land, charcoal runs 
over in the streams, it makes it almost impossible to come back and 
reforest in those areas. Many thousands of acres have been blown down 
through wind damage. These are also hard to reforest, to return to 
forest health.
  Insects and disease in our national forests are not only consuming 
parts of our national forests but they are moving over into private 
lands. Most silviculturalists recognize the only way to stop the 
insect-infested movements is to destroy the tree, take out the host 
tree, either burn it or use it if you can get to it early enough, 
remove it so that there is not the location for the insects to move on 
year after year.
  We know all of this because we have over 100 years of silviculture at 
our disposal, both from our best universities that have taught forestry 
going back almost 100 years when the first school of forestry started 
in this country. We know it from numerous experimental stations that we 
have, both private, Federal, and State and at university centers. We 
know it because silviculture is a science that is taught and studied 
and is probably one of the best informed sciences that we have because 
we have been studying for over 100 years in this area now.
  With all of this accumulated knowledge we allow special interest 
groups in Washington to take in hundreds of millions of dollars, 
scaring people with misinformation, bad science, and pandering to 
politicians. The President has bought their message, hook, line, and 
sinker, because according to a Wall Street Journal story about the 
polling of the environmental organizations in Washington, we find that 
over 93 percent voted for Mr. Clinton. They are primarily far left. The 
report also showed that they are contrary in most of the things they 
report to the actual science that we know in these 
areas. [[Page H5687]] 
  What we tried to do with the timber amendment that we had was to give 
the Forest Service the tools and the responsibility to move into the 
forests and move out the dead and diseased trees. The President today 
in his veto message said, and I am quoting, ``I have done more for 
logging than any other single person in this country.'' Well, the 
President told us his first term here in 1993 that he was cutting the 
budget
 deficit with his $100 billion tax increase; then he came to Congress 
and said he was increasing the deficit by over $1 trillion in his 4 
years in office. He told us that he was working to balance the budget, 
and he did not. He has told this Congress many things. His story in 
foreign policy and Bosnia has changed no fewer than six times just in 
the last few weeks, so when he says that he has done more for helping 
the forests, the unemployed forest people in the Pacific Northwest or 
other parts of the country, it should be taken with a grain of salt by 
now. Certainly if you ask the forest families, the tens of thousands of 
people who are unemployed because of his misinformation and policy he 
has put in place in the Pacific Northwest, they will tell you very 
quickly how much he has done for the resource in this Nation

  So, those of us in Congress by a vote of 277 in the House, which is 
almost two-thirds of this body, spoke out for forest health, and today 
the President has vetoed that.
  It will come back to him. It will be back if there is another 
rescission package brought forth. It will be back in the Interior 
appropriations bill, because those of us that recognize the true 
science in silviculture, the health of our national forests, and 
recognize the phony misinformation that the President is getting, is 
wrong, we are going to see that that legislation is put back before him 
again and again.
  His closing statement in his veto message was that we had with our 
timber amendment abolished all environmental legislation. Clearly, he 
could not have studied this himself. He took this right out of the 
radical environmental fringe that houses itself in Washington and puts 
out so much misinformation. It is ludicrous to think that a timber 
salvage amendment could abolish all of the environmental legislation 
that this country has passed in the last 20 years. It boggles the mind 
to think that we could even do it, much less have done it.
  So I would ask the President to go back and reconsider what he has 
just said and the misinformation, and sign this bill for the families 
of America and the resources of this country and our forest health.

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