[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 127 (Monday, September 16, 1996)]
[Senate]
[Pages S10571-S10572]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                        A MESSAGE FROM THE WEST

  Mr. CRAIG. Mr. President, with my colleague from Wyoming just having 
spoken, one would think it is ``Western day'' on the floor of the U.S. 
Senate, especially when I choose to come to the floor this morning also 
to speak about Western public lands issues.
  Certainly, the issue of national parks, in which the Senator from 
Wyoming is so knowledgeable, is not just a Western issue; it is clearly 
a national issue, with national parks spanning the length and breath of 
our country.
  I come to visit about an issue that has been in the skies of the West 
all summer. It doesn't happen to be there at this moment. As I flew out 
of Idaho this weekend after a rainstorm, the sky was clear. But for 
well over 2 months this summer, up until this weekend, Western skies 
have not been clear. They have been filled with smoke.
  If you had flown over Idaho or nearly any part of the West as I have 
many times this summer, you would have been convinced that the West 
truly was on fire. In many instances, that was true. Our Western 
forests and rangelands have burned again at an unprecedented rate this 
summer. Smoke from extensive wildfires invaded our cities. It damaged 
tourism, it caused health problems, and homes adjacent to the public 
lands were in jeopardy and many burned as a result of the high incident 
of wildfires.
  I know that you and others have seen this on television, it was 
talked about oftentimes on national television and in the newspapers 
through the course of the summer. Wildfires were regular occurrences on 
nightly news shows in the West in States like Oregon or Idaho or 
California or Arizona or New Mexico or Montana or Wyoming or in places 
in Utah.
  Tragically, what we heard this summer has become a regular occurrence 
which we in the West have had to endure. Nearly every 2 years, it 
seems, since 1988, the frequency and intensity of fire has gone well 
beyond the historic norm. Its genesis is the increasingly poor health 
of our public forests and the fuel buildup from millions of acres of 
dead and dying trees and unforaged, or in other words, nongrazed, 
grasslands of the West. It is a problem that we could do something 
about in this Congress and as Americans if we chose to do so.
  These fires are destroying our resources, trying our patience and 
exhausting our financial ability to suppress them. This year another 
record will be set with more than 6 million acres burned, in excess of 
the record set only 2 years ago, and before that, in 1988. In fact, 
this is the largest amount of acres burned in a single year since 1967.
  Firefighting forces started the year with over $400 million of debt, 
and the deficit continues to pile up as more and more Federal personnel 
and equipment are thrown into this battle against wildfire.
  The Knutson-Vandenburg, known as the KV, fund has been the handy 
source from which we have borrowed hundreds of millions of dollars to 
pay for emergency firefighting costs, and it is now broke. There is no 
money in the fund. KV moneys are collected from timber sale revenues 
specifically to replant and regenerate public forests with new 
seedings. Because the borrowed money has not been replaced, the tree 
planting programs are now in jeopardy.
  In other words, what we are doing is we are borrowing all of the 
money to fight fires, but we are not putting the money back, so there 
is no money to replant the forests.
  Tragically enough, there are some folks out there who say, ``Oh, 
well, this is Mother Nature; let it be.'' I am one of those who cannot 
agree with that, and I think most of our colleagues cannot, and 
certainly the citizens of the West cannot.
  My question to my colleagues is simple: How long can we ignore what 
is happening in our western forests? If that smoke were blowing through 
the urban canyons of the eastern cities, how long would the public put 
up with it before demanding action from their Representatives in 
Congress?
  I have offered a long-term, broad-based solution with my legislation 
to restore forest health. We have a chance to pass that legislation. It 
is S. 391, which was approved by the Energy and Natural Resources 
Committee in June; but it has been hung up in politics, politics, and 
environmental politics that have no basis in science and no 
understanding of the tragedy that our western national forests are 
experiencing today. It is simply the politics of politics that has 
stopped efforts to deal with forest health, and I ask that you help me 
to change that, because we should be addressing the crisis that exists, 
and will continue to exist, in the western forests.
  I have stood in this Chamber to sustain the temporary emergency 
salvage law which is critical to our short-term needs from the 1994 
fires. And, yes, I have heard some people claim that there is no 
emergency.
  If that is true, they were not listening to the nightly news this 
summer, or they were not listening in Idaho or Oregon or Washington or 
Montana or Wyoming or Utah or Arizona or California or New Mexico. They 
are simply ignoring the fact, or they are being lulled to sleep by the 
symphony of environmental voices that would only argue that this is 
Mother Nature at her finest.
  There is an emergency. A critical emergency. But in most people's 
minds it is not an emergency until the fire starts and is roaring up 
the mountainside and threatening their own town. Then it becomes an 
emergency overnight, and all of the resources of the State and Federal 
Government, including the Army and the Marines, are brought into the 
fight. Oregon's Governor, in fact, this year declared a state of 
emergency because of the fires roaring across the State of Oregon.

  Would it not make more sense to take preventive actions before the 
crisis starts? Of course that makes sense, but then again it is not 
politically correct right now to make sense about the idea of managing 
our forests if man is involved in that management. It makes better 
sense for some to argue that you simply lock them up and let Mother 
Nature do her thing. Well, Mother Nature was doing her thing this 
summer,

[[Page S10572]]

and she burned well over 6 million acres of land, land whose forests 
will now take decades and sometimes generations to restore or replace 
themselves.
  First of all, we must permit active management of these forests. We 
must reduce forest fuels to restrict the size of the fires and cool 
their intensity. Some scratch their heads and say, ``What are you 
talking about, Senator? Fires are hot.''
  That is right, but some fires are hotter than others. And when you 
have phenomenal fuel buildup of the kind we have seen because of the 
dead and dying trees on these forest floors, and ignored because of the 
absence of management, these fires are intensively hotter than the 
normal fires that oftentimes amble through a forest burning shrubbery 
but not destroying and killing the trees. Those normal fires are the 
fires of Mother Nature of decades ago, those are the fires that 
periodically cleansed our forests. But these cleansing fires were not 
the fires of the summer of 1996.
  Would it not make more sense to take the preventive action that I am 
talking about? Of course, we could do that. First we must permit, as I 
have mentioned, the active management of our forests. We must reduce 
the fuels. One needed activity is salvage timber removal, and my guess 
is we will be back on this floor later this year, and probably the 
first of next year, asking for flexibility to do salvage on some of 
these 6 million burned acres. There will be Senators on this floor who 
will say, ``But environmental groups do not want this; it would be 
destructive.'' And so we would let hundreds of millions of dollars in 
trees then rot and wash away, and we would not replenish our funds to 
replant and regenerate our forests. For the life of me, I cannot 
understand how that is good business, good environmental business, good 
economic business, for that matter, or just good management. It is, in 
fact, poor management, poor management at its very worst.
  Let me close by asking the cooperation of the Senate, whether it is 
the passage of my forest health legislation or whether it is just the 
simple awakening to the situation that exists in the western forests of 
today, a situation that is largely our doing, largely our doing because 
we have been so good at putting out fires over the last 30 years that 
we have now created the circumstance which creates the extraordinary, 
the unusual, the dramatic fires that we saw in the West this summer.
  So I hope that we recognize an emergency exists, and if we created 
it, we ought to be able to manage it. The science of forestry today 
argues that we can, but it is not a science of ignorance or a science 
of turning your back. It is a science that demands the kind of active 
management that the U.S. Forest Service and its professionals know how 
to use, if they would only be allowed to do so.
  Frankly, it is not the science of this administration, which has 
passively ignored the problem because of the pressure placed upon them 
by certain environmental groups to do nothing and walk away. In Idaho 
and the rest of the Western States over the next decade, doing nothing 
and walking away will simply create another summer of 1996 over and 
over again. Millions of acres will be burned, houses and private 
property will be lost, and the debt will mount, a debt that the public 
owes for fighting these fires in an effort to save the resource and 
save private lands and private resources. We can avoid this. We can 
avoid this by wise and responsible management.
  I yield back the remainder of my time.
  Mr. President, I note the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. SIMPSON. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. SIMPSON. Mr. President, what is the time situation and the 
procedure situation?
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The pending business right now is we are in 
morning business until 2 o'clock; between 12 and 1 it is under the 
control of Senator Daschle, and then, from 1 until 2 o'clock, morning 
business will be under the control of Republicans.
  Mr. SIMPSON. With that, Mr. President, and a thank you to my friend 
from Montana, Senator Burns, because I will take a few minutes, and 
then perhaps 5 minutes of the time under our administration will go to 
him. I will not take 15; I may take 7--maybe.
  Mr. BURNS. You can take as much as you want.
  Mr. SIMPSON. Mr. President, that was a noble comment from my friend 
from Montana. Absolutely the generosity matches only his magnanimous 
smile, and I love it. I will just continue now for an hour and 40--no, 
excuse me. That just slipped. It slipped away for a moment. That is the 
trouble with me, Mr. President. I take my work seriously but not 
myself. That can get you in a lot of difficulty in life, but that is 
still the best way to fly.
  Mr. BURNS. I thank my colleague.

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