[Congressional Record Volume 146, Number 120 (Monday, October 2, 2000)]
[House]
[Pages H8599-H8605]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
THE FUTURE OF RURAL AMERICA
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of
January 6, 1999, the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Peterson) is
recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, I and a group here rise
tonight to talk about rural America, the heartland of this country. The
last few years we have had the most fantastic economic boom in this
country in our history, but the question many ask is why has so much of
rural America been left behind. Why has rural America struggled for its
economic life when suburban America is flourishing and enjoying
unparalleled prosperity?
We believe that a lack of leadership is very much a part of that.
Rural America has not fared well under the Clinton-Gore policies. We
are also very concerned that rural America will not fare well under a
Gore administration.
Agriculture, at a time when this country has expanded its ability to
grow products, wonderful products, better, better yields, better
quality, our farmers are fighting for their economic life. World
markets have not been opened because of inappropriate public policies.
Mr. Speaker, public land, America owns a third of our land; and when
we have Federal public policy changes, it impacts rural America, not
urban-suburban America. It impacts rural America, because that is the
land we own. We are a country rich in natural resources, and many
people claim that our strength and our great past was because we had
those natural resources.
Have we had appropriate policies for energy, for mining that allowed
us to enjoy the fruit of what was here? Many think not.
Defense, the number one issue in the Federal Government, would it be
strong under a Gore administration? Rural education, as we have the
debate now going on education, how has rural America fared? Most rural
districts receive 1 percent to 2 percent of their money from the
Federal Government when the Federal Government's claiming that they are
funding 7 percent.
The complicated urban-type formulas are stacked against rural America
in many people's opinions. Rural health care fighting for its economic
life, rural hospitals fighting to stay open. Rural America sometimes
gets paid half as much under the current policies and formulas devised
by HCFA that has been managed by the Gore-Clinton administration.
Timber, good forestry, a country rich in soft woods in the West and
hard woods in the East, we are now importing, I am told, about half of
our soft woods. Because of policies similar to oil we are now importing
60 percent from foreign countries.
Endangered Species Act needing to be changed, positively, to save
endangered species; but it has been used by radical groups to push
their will on the American citizens and supported by the Gore-Clinton
administration.
Regulatory process, something Americans do not think enough about,
because, in my view, an overzealous bureaucracy that regulates you,
they are regulating instead of legislating. When we legislate, we
debate. We debate the facts. We make decisions. We cast votes, but when
the regulators have too much power, and I think everyone agrees that
the Clinton-Gore administration has been far too zealous in their
regulatory powers. The courts have been turning over many of their
regulations.
So as we go through these issues and a few others tonight, the first
person I want to call on is my good friend, the gentleman from Oklahoma
(Mr. Watkins), of the third district who is interested in agriculture
in Oklahoman agriculture and energy, and how it affects Oklahoma and
how it affects rural America.
Mr. WATKINS. First, let me thank my colleague from Pennsylvania (Mr.
Peterson) for his concern and for his time tonight for us to talk about
some of this inappropriateness and lack of action by this Gore-Clinton
administration.
Mr. Speaker, I would like first for my colleagues to know that I
stand tonight not for political reasons, but because of an emotional
concern, a life-long emotional concern about small towns and rural
areas of this country, yes, our farms and our agriculture interests
also throughout this Nation.
Let me share with my colleagues, I loved agriculture to the point in
small town rural America, but even to the point that I majored in
agriculture when I went off to college, I got a couple of degrees in
agriculture, so I stand
[[Page H8600]]
with this emotional concern not just political concern.
Back when I served as State president of the Oklahoma Future Farmers
of America, I would stand and I shared 16 percent of our people were in
production of agriculture in the United States. 4 years later, when I
received the Outstanding Agriculture Student Award at Oklahoma State
University, I stood up and said there is only 12\1/2\ percent of us in
the production of agriculture in the United States.
Tonight as I stand before my colleagues, I say there is only 1.5
percent of people in the production of agriculture; that is the erosion
that has taken place in rural America. There is no other way I can
paint the picture any better.
Not too long ago, earlier this year, I was invited to speak on
agriculture before the Farm Credit Association in Oklahoma. They wanted
to know the title of my speech. I usually do not have a title, but I
said if you need to have a title, you can state it is ``American
Agriculture changing from the PTO to the WTO.''
Now, PTO stands for the power take-off on the tractors which allowed
us to get bigger farms and bigger units and allowed us to produce the
food and fiber for this country. We can produce. Our big problem is
being able to sell and now we have the World Trade Organization that we
must be able to market through, 135 countries around this world; and we
cannot forfeit those markets.
Let me share with my colleagues something on an inappropriate
activity that took place in the Uruguay Rounds back in 1993 under this
administration's United States trade representative. At the Uruguay
Rounds, they basically had resolved all of the various disagreements in
trade, and it came down to agriculture and they could not agree on
settling their difference in agriculture. They established a peace
clause. Now that sounds good, a peace clause. However, what did it do?
Actually, the peace clause of the Uruguay Rounds, the GATT talks,
established and grandfathered in over $7 billion of subsidies for the
European Union. We only have about $100 million, and there is a lot of
differences in $100 million and $7 billion of subsidies which allows
the European Union to grab our markets, preventing us from being able
to sell around the world in many cases. I can go on and on and talk
about agriculture, but I had to make that point.
But I stand with a sadness tonight, because I see what is happening
is just pure politics concerning the energy industry. The Vice
President attacks the fossil fuel industry; but I would like to point
out to the American people and to my colleagues, he has no
alternatives, he has no other options, except to attack, that would
endanger us even more.
One of our colleagues earlier from Florida stated the fact that we
now import about 56 percent of our energy from oil from foreign sources
compared to that or less than 40 percent back there in the oil barrel
embargo. We are becoming more dependent.
Let me say, I submit to my colleagues, I submit to the American
people that today we are more dependent than we ever have been at a
time when we think we are independent. We are more dependent on a
viable source of oil supply for this country, and the fact remains
under the 8 years of the Gore-Clinton administration, they have not
developed a national energy policy for the protection of this country.
We have not moved forward to try to make sure we secure the energy
and develop the energy for this Nation, the fossil fuel, as well as the
renewable energy. We still have today more fossil fuel reserves in the
ground than we have mined or drilled and taken from the ground. It is a
matter of us having a policy that will allow us to move forward.
So the people of this Nation need to know our national security is at
stake. Yes, we have a volatile energy policy it appears, to say the
least, when it goes from $20 down to $8 which not only disturbed the
energy patch. It literally took nearly 100,000 of employees out of the
rural areas of this country that were producing the energy for our
Nation.
It is hurting the consumers. I have suggested that we reached out in
a bipartisan way and we come together and we develop a national energy
policy that would stabilize fuel prices in an amount we can all work
with and live with and let us produce the Nation's needed energy. To do
no less is making us subject to blackmail. We have seen this go
overseas to OPEC and get on bended knee and beg, that is un-American.
Let me say it hurts not only the consumers in the urban centers of
this country, but devastates rural America.
I hope and I pray that we will move forward, and I hope and pray that
we do quickly because the future of our children and our grandchildren
are at stake and the future of our country is at stake.
I say to the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Peterson), I think the
gentleman is lifting an issue of rural America and the lack of support,
the lack of effort being made in the energy and agriculture and other
areas that our people of this Nation need to know that under 8 years of
the Gore-Clinton administration they have done nothing, zilch, zero in
trying to move us towards some kind of independence in the field of
energy.
Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from
Oklahoma (Mr. Watkins).
I am not minimizing the importance of agriculture, because it is
vital, what do we do in rural America. We farm. We mine. We drill for
oil. We cut timber. We manufacture, all under attack, in my view,
through the regulatory process of this administration. And it is where
rural jobs come from, and it is why urban areas are becoming crowded
and rural America is becoming more sparsely populated, because the jobs
have been forced out of rural America.
We have become as a country dependent on the rest of the world
instead of strong and independent because of our own natural resources.
Mr. Speaker, next I will yield to the gentleman from Nevada (Mr.
Gibbons), who is going to talk about mining and the interest he feels
passionately about.
Mr. GIBBONS. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Pennsylvania
(Mr. Peterson), my colleague and good friend, for inviting me to join
him in this dialogue this evening and on a very important issue about
the future of rural America and its importance to this great country.
As the gentleman has just said, our rural economies and our rural
areas are so valuable to the natural resources of this Nation. Mining,
of course, like the gentleman before us from Oklahoma (Mr. Watkins),
who spoke about the oil industry and the fact that we are becoming so
dependent upon industries outside of the borders of this country for
our economy and for our well-being and for the quality of life that we
have. Mining also fits into that very same category.
Mining is endangered at this very point, because of the policies of
this administration and as well as I can imagine under any type of
administration from a Gore administration would be as well.
{time} 2015
How are they doing that? They are taking the control of the public
lands upon which most mining occurs. They are regulating through the
administration these businesses out of business. Secondly, they are
taking away the utility of our natural resources and our ability to
produce them and keep the economy of this great country going.
In doing so, what their ultimate choice is is to endanger both the
economy and the national security of this great Nation.
Let us look at how they control vast areas of this country. As the
gentleman has said, approximately 800,000 square miles of the United
States, the western part of the United States, a size equal to most of
the leading industrialized world combined, including Japan, Germany,
Great Britain, France, and Italy, plus Ireland, and Denmark,
Switzerland, the Netherlands, Belgium, as well as a few Luxumbourgs
thrown in for good measure, 815,000 square miles of public land is
regulated by the administration.
Upon those lands are where we gain much of our natural resources,
including mining. Mining is indeed part of our everyday lives, and as
we know, most individuals, every man, woman, and child in this great
country consumes about 44,000 pounds of mined
[[Page H8601]]
materials in one form or another every year. That is 44,000 pounds of
mined materials, whether it is coal, fuel, the electricity plant that
generates the energy for our daily living, or whether it is metal mined
for a vehicle to drive us to and from work, that we use in our jobs, or
even the jewelry that we wear is part of our everyday life.
And especially when we start thinking about medical apparati, medical
technology, the mining industry has indeed provided us with the quality
of health care that we have today that is indeed pushing out new
frontiers and keeping America alive, making our own lives longer, and
giving us a better quality of life due to mining.
Well, with that 815,000 square miles, and this administration
seemingly hell-bent on acquiring more land and using administrative
procedures to push the public off the public land to push mining
companies off of land and force them overseas, we are growing into a
new dependence, for all the strategic minerals and metals that we need
for our armed forces and for everyday living, on countries where they
can go mine and have the opportunity to do so. Therefore, like oil, we
are soon to become dependent for these metals and materials.
We are left with two very critical choices. Mr. Speaker, we are left
with a choice of whether we develop our own resources and keep our
children, our sons and daughters, home, or do we go ahead and allow for
mining activity to move overseas at the insistence of the Gore
administration, and following up by sending our sons and our daughters
over there to defend the national security when those vital critical
elements to our economy are cut off at some point? So we have those
very delicate balancing choices we need to make.
I am really concerned about what this administration is doing through
the United Nations as well. I heard recently that many of the leaders
of the United Nations have tried to enlist 25 specified international
agreements to establish a legal framework of international governance,
a body of binding rules that would also affect how we operate in this
country and make it even more difficult for mining to succeed.
Such conventions and protocols are the primary interest of
environmental programs which have been on a campaign to make new world
environmental organizations the deciding factor in what we do at home.
Let me say just one quick analogy here. If resources were the measure
of a country's wealth, the United States would not be the number one
economy in the world, Russia would be. Russia has more oil, gas, more
timber, more mined minerals than any other Nation. But because Russia
could not develop those natural resources, because Russia had to depend
upon outside sources, Russia is not the number one economy in this
world, the United States is, because the United States learned long ago
how to develop its own natural resources, whether it is timber, whether
it is mining, whether it is farming and agriculture, developing the
land and making those resources work for us.
I am interested in what these candidates stand for and how an
administration is going to critically hurt our rural America. I looked
at the vice president's book, Earth in the Balance. The vice president
himself argued that some new arm of the U.N. should be empowered to act
on environmental concerns in the fashion of a Security Council, and in
other matters. There should be global constraints and legally valid
penalties for noncompliance.
Well, most mining companies today have a very strong, very hard
dependent environmental quality that they use in their operations every
day around this world. I will be the first to admit that there are some
historically bad practices out there in the past that have given mining
a bad image, but today's practice is environmentally sound. We have
most mining companies, they are shareholder-owned, citizen-owned. They
have a responsibility to their shareholders, a fiduciary
responsibility, and they are going to keep our country and our
resources in this world I think used with the highest priority and
safety, environmental safety, that we have.
Let me also say that the administration under Vice President Gore has
proposed a new tax on the mining industry, a tax that amounts to a
royalty on mined minerals that would amount to about $200 million a
year over a 10-year period. That is a $2 billion new tax. At a time
when our government is flush with surplus tax revenues, they want a $2
billion tax increase.
Do Members know what they plan to do with that money? I think they
plan to acquire more public land, kicking the public off.
Nevada is one of those States where I think it has the highest
percentage of land in its borders that is managed and owned by the
Federal government, at about 89 percent. That leaves us with about 11
percent for our real estate tax base developed property. It takes away
a lot of the area that mines could go and work with private
individuals.
So buying up more land only excludes the public from this land. It
excludes our mining industries, again forcing them overseas, so buying
up that land is not in the best interests of rural America. It puts
people out of jobs. It puts communities on the brink of disaster and
failure and financial bankruptcy. All of this makes those rural
communities become more and more dependent upon urban communities for
their support. I am sure America does not want that.
I am also worried that the next president must understand mining, and
our president must make great strides in becoming a responsible steward
of the land. He must understand that mining is a responsible steward of
the land. I would hope that he understands that mining is as important
to our urban communities as mining is to our rural communities, not
just for the jobs but for the direct result of what they produce and
put out for consumption to the American public.
We need an administration that will invite all interested parties to
the table. When it comes to establishing public policy, this
administration has not. It has relied solely on extremist environmental
groups to make those decisions. They have dictated mining out of
existence.
It is not my nature to stand here and join with my colleague and be
so political, but I believe this election is going to be particularly
important to America. It is going to be particularly important to rural
America. It is going to be pivotal to the future of this country. It
will be pivotal to determining the future of mining.
Because there is an old saying: Mining works for Nevada, but if it
works for the rest of the Nation as well, then it is a good product. It
is a good organization. It is a good industry to have.
There is one final saying that I want to leave my colleagues with
here today about mining. That is, in mining, you have to remember that
if it isn't grown, it has to be mined.
I want to thank my colleague, the gentleman from Pennsylvania, for
allowing me to stand here and give a little bit of introduction on the
value of mining. I just want everybody to remember the 44,000 pounds we
each consume every year of mined minerals. It is critical to the future
of this country and to the quality of life each and every one of us
have.
I thank the gentleman for allowing me to be here.
Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. If we are not mining it from our own
lands, we will be buying it from some foreign country.
Mr. GIBBONS. If the gentleman will continue to yield, as the
gentleman says, our oil right now, we are 60 percent dependent upon
international deliveries of oil. When we reach the point where mining
is overseas and our metals and strategic metals are now produced
overseas, we will then become dependent upon those countries, as well,
and we will end up making the choice, do we send our sons and daughters
over there to defend the vital national interests of those strategic
minerals to the United States?
Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. I thank the gentleman. Most of us
tonight that will be speaking have large rural districts, some of the
West but some from the East. I have the largest district east of the
Mississippi in Pennsylvania, but our next speaker, Mr. Sherwood, who
joined us in 1998, 2 short years ago, comes from a district almost as
large as mine, a gentleman who was a very successful businessman and
had not served in government per se except for the school board, local
government; I should not say except for local government. That is the
most
[[Page H8602]]
important government we have, local government.
He served very well there, has been a very successful businessman,
and has transitioned into a very successful Congressman. He brings so
much knowledge and experience of the community with him.
Mr. Speaker, I yield to my friend, the gentleman from the eastern
part of Pennsylvania (Mr. Sherwood), who will share with us the
perspective of his rural district.
Mr. SHERWOOD. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding me.
Mr. Speaker, I ran for Congress because it had been my observation
that in northeastern and north central Pennsylvania, we exported our
milk and our stone and our timber and our manufactured goods, but we
had also for a couple generations been exporting our children.
The reason we exported our children is they would grow up in these
good families and get an education and go somewhere else to find a job,
because we did not have enough good jobs at home. I have worked very
hard to get more good jobs in northeastern Pennsylvania. We have been
pretty successful at that. But the first rule if we want a good economy
in our own districts is to protect the jobs we have.
What do we historically do in the country? When I was a young man
growing up in Nicholson, we had three feed mills, or excuse me, five
feed mills, two car dealerships, three creameries. If we go through
that town today, there are not any of those.
Why did that happen? That happened because we lost our agricultural
base. In the country, there are a few things we do for a living. We
farm, we timber, we quarry stone. Those are all very important revenue
producers and sources of employment and sources of good, stable family
life in my district.
I am concerned that we have policies in this country that are making
those industries less and less viable. I am concerned that we are
looking at an election coming up right away for president where one of
the candidates does not believe in any of those industries, does not
really seem to believe in a rural way of life.
We talk about the environment and we talk about rural jobs and
resource jobs as if they were exclusive. With a well-run country, they
are not mutually exclusive. We can have a good economy and a pristine
environment if we continue to manage it carefully.
In Pennsylvania, we have the sustainable forestry initiative. We have
the Chesapeake Bay initiative. Both are programs that have taught our
forest industry people when they can timber, when they can't timber,
when they have to be worried about degrading the water supply. They
have taught our farmers nutrient management, and that everything we do
runs downhill and eventually ends up in the Chesapeake.
We have learned a lot in the last 20 years. We have learned a lot
about how we are good stewards of our environment and the people that
are downstream.
Yet, we have an EPA now that wants to make all farming operations
point source polluters, all forestry operations point source polluters,
when these two issues have been very capably dealt with by our
Pennsylvania DCNR.
That would be an unprecedented power grab by the EPA that would
federalize all these small business practices, all these landowners
that are farming on their land or harvesting their timber. It would be
an unnecessary escalation of the authority of the Federal government,
and it would be very cumbersome, very hard to manage.
So that is why I am concerned, as some of my colleagues are
concerned, about the direction the country might take when we have our
election in November.
{time} 2030
We need a rural economy that stays strong. We need to protect those
jobs, protect those families, protect the small towns that live off the
forest products industry, the mining industry, and agriculture. We need
sustainable agriculture. We do not need it all concentrated in just a
couple areas of the country.
If one has small dairy farms dispersed around the country, that is a
very environmentally friendly way to raise our milk and our food and
our fiber. When one has huge concentrations of animals in one area, one
gets problems like we saw in the Tar River and the floods of a year
ago.
So we want policies that will keep our farmers operating in the
Northeast. To do that, we have to have a good energy policy. And we
have to understand what we have to work with, that we need to work on
our domestic supply, and that we have to understand the industry.
I am not afraid of the internal combustion engine, and neither is
rural America.
Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from
the eastern part of Pennsylvania (Mr. Sherwood). Rural America does not
go very far without it. We do not accomplish very much agriculture
without it. So I thank the gentleman from the eastern part of the
State.
Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Weldon),
another Pennsylvanian, to share with us something that he shared with
me earlier tonight that a large number of our Armed Forces of our
recruits come from rural America. He is going to talk about rural
America's concern about our defense.
Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for
this special order on rural America. Let me talk briefly about two
categories of our defense. The first is our domestic defense. Our
domestic defense relies on the 32,000 organized departments that are in
every rural town in America. In fact, as my colleague knows,
Pennsylvania has 2,600 of these rural fire and EMS departments. They
are in every small town in every county in this Nation, in Montana, in
Idaho, in Alabama, in Arkansas, in Hawaii, in New York, California.
They are there. And 1.2 million men and women, 32,000 departments, 85
percent of them are volunteers. In fact, they are the oldest volunteers
in the history of the country, older than America itself.
Now, the important thing is, what has this administration done to
these people who are serving America, who are responding to floods,
tornadoes, earthquakes, hazmat incidents, and fires? Well, they have
cut the only program for rural fire departments which has been
authorized at about $20 million a year. This administration cut it last
year to this year from $3.5 million to $2.5 million. What a disgrace.
The President sneezes and spends more than $2.5 million a year. Yet,
this administration has done nothing for rural fire departments.
Now, why should they? Well, these people lose 100 of their colleagues
every year that are killed. Name me one other volunteer group from
America where 100 of their members are killed in the line of duty. They
have ordinary jobs, but they are killed protecting their towns and
their communities.
But this administration, they claim they are for volunteers. We saw
them develop the AmeriCorps program. Is that not amazing, a $500
million program supposedly designed to help create volunteers. But
guess what, the volunteer fire service cannot apply because it is not
politically correct to fight fires and respond to disasters. So here we
have an administration that is so insensitive to our domestic defenders
that they created a half-a-billion-dollar program, giving scholarships,
incentives for people to volunteer, but they cannot volunteer in their
communities, especially the rural communities where they so desperately
need people to man those trucks and their ambulances. This
administration just does not get it.
Now, Harris Wofford, the head of that program, just called me today,
and they now want to do something after the program has been in
existence for about 6 years because they realize how insensitive they
have been.
The gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Peterson) talked about our
international defenders, our military. He is right. The gentleman from
Pennsylvania is often right, and he is right. The bulk of our military
personnel are from the farms. They are from rural America. They are
patriotic. They are dedicated. They will go any place that America
sends them, and they will perform any task.
But do my colleagues know something? Look at what has happened to
them. We have had three simultaneous things occur under this
administration:
[[Page H8603]]
the largest decrease in defense spending, the largest increase in the
use of our military around the world, and the absolute ignorance when
it comes to arms control and the proliferation that has been occurring
by China and Russia to rogue states, which further harms our Americans.
In fact, it was rural Pennsylvanians, 15 of them that came home in
body bags in 1992 because this administration and other administrations
had not done enough to build missile defense systems to stop that Scud
missile when it hit the barracks in Saudi Arabia.
This administration has not done well by our military. The best
evidence of that is our retention rate right now for pilots in the Air
Force and the Navy is 15 percent. People are getting out because they
are fed up with all of these deployments.
None of the Services over the past 3 years have been able to meet
their recruitment quotas except for the Marine Corps because young
people are saying, I do not want to join. Those farmers are saying, in
the past, we have gone in the military, but I am fed up now because you
are sending me from one deployment to the other.
Our once proud Navy which went from 585 ships to 317 ships now have
to take people off of one aircraft carrier and move them to another,
and they are still 600 sailors short on every aircraft carrier deployed
in harm's way today.
What this administration has done to our military and has done to
those brave Americans, many and oftentimes most of whom are from our
rural areas, is absolutely outrageous. In fact, I think it is going to
go down in history, the past 8 years, as our worst period of time in
our history in undermining America's security.
If we look at the history records of World War II, the Vietnam War,
World War I, the conflict Desert Storm, our volunteers from the
heartland of America are always the first to come and volunteer for
this country. But, again, we have not done well by them.
Those veterans out there across America have not been taken care of
by this administration. This Congress had to fight to give our veterans
and our military personnel cost of living increases because this
administration thought it was more important to give an IRS agent an
increase in their cost of living than they did to men and women who
were serving and our veterans who have served.
We have got to change that. We need a President that will lead a
Congress in proud support of our international defenders and in proud
support of our domestic defenders. Al Gore just does not cut that.
Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman
from California (Mr. Radanovich) who is going to talk about the war on
the West.
Mr. RADANOVICH. Mr. Speaker, I thank very much the gentleman from
Pennsylvania (Mr. Peterson) noting that I will be talking about the
``War on the West''. I just want to make sure he knows I define the
West as anything west of the East Coast.
So I appreciate this time to be able to talk on this subject, mainly
about rural America and I think this administration's assault on rural
America. While the ``War on the West'' might be a tired slogan, it is
not nearly as tired as the people who continue to fight their own
government to preserve their way of life.
As President Clinton's reign over western lands draws to a close, the
war has been renewed with fresh vigor. New regulations sprout like
kudzu, an unstoppable creeping vine, it strangles the jobs and life out
of many western and rural communities.
During the past 8 years, the Federal Government has been a tough
opponent. Few small businesses and landowners can withstand the due
diligence of government lawyers who have unlimited funds and unlimited
time.
For the victims, bureaucratic time is like Chinese water torture,
slowly eroding the small business owner's ability to meet payroll and
pay the bills. The waiting game is the government's most powerful
weapon against individuals.
Delays and uncertainty can destroy any small business. But it is only
in the West and in rural America where the Federal Government controls
over half of the land, where our economy is dependent on natural
resources, that a little bureaucratic red tape puts entire counties out
of work.
Ask somebody who comes from rural Oregon or ask somebody who comes
from rural California.
An example, in 1997, the Bureau of Land Management decided to carry
out environmental assessments on every single grazing permit renewal.
These can be very time consuming and expensive. It was a choice only a
bureaucrat with government time and money would make.
Over 5,000 permits expired in 1999, nearly a fourth of the total
number. Everybody knew that the BLM lacked the manpower to complete all
the reviews in time. The ranchers faced enormous uncertainty, they
feared they would have no place to put their cows and no extra feed
available.
The Clinton-Gore administration showed all the concern that we would
expect from Federal agents. They did not show much concern about the
ranchers without permits who would go out of business. Maybe, Mr.
Speaker, that was the point.
It took Congress to step in and temporarily renew the permits until
the environmental reviews were completed. That move was labeled as an
antienvironmental rider that ``offered a perverse incentive for the BLM
to delay environmental analysis.''
One thing people do not get is that when one puts ranchers out of
business, they sell the ranch. The people who work there lose their
jobs. The suppliers in the town lose their jobs. The people who buy the
ranch, they build subdivisions.
This destruction of America's rural jobs is the unavoidable side
effect of the Clinton-Gore public land policies. Politics has driven
their systemic effort to demonize people who live on the land. They
equate producers with destroyers.
They claim to save nature from man, and in the process, they gain
political favor in the cities where people do not understand our rural
culture, nor do they understand environmental stewardship.
Another example, President Clinton's Northwest Forest Plan virtually
eliminated timber harvesting from almost 21 acres of forests in
Washington and Oregon. Since 1990, almost 20,000 forests and mill
workers in those two States have lost their jobs.
It is estimated that those industries supported another 40,000 to
60,000 service jobs. This all happened in small communities where
unemployment is already over 15 percent.
This pattern has been repeated across the West. Thousands of mining,
trucking and refining jobs have been lost by preventing the expansion
or opening of new mines. The government has starved and destroyed
countless small oil and gas producers and drillers by delaying
regulatory permits.
The Clinton administration is now taking the final step by
restricting recreational access as to Federal lands, a move that will
erode the very tourism jobs they promised would sustain rural America
after they eliminated the resource jobs.
What is most disturbing is that these unfortunate rural victims seem
to be expendable casualties in the game of Presidential politics.
The chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the
gentleman from Rhode Island (Mr. Kennedy) recently said that Democrats
have basically written off the rural areas. That statement alone sheds
light on the rural cleansing machine at work.
In 1996, the year of the Clinton-Gore reelection campaign, President
Clinton designated 1.8 million-acre of Grand Staircase Escalante
Monument in Utah. Initially, the Presidential advisor Katie McGinty,
chairman of Council on Environmental Quality, expressed concern about
abusing the Antiquities Act and stated that these lands are not really
endangered.
But she later changed her position, apparently convinced of the
political value in making such a designation. The process was pushed
forward in spite of statewide outrage, and the Nation lost access to 62
billion tons of clean coal, 3 to 5 billion barrels of oil and 2 to 4
trillion cubic feet of clean-burning natural gas. The children of Utah
lost billions of dollars in future royalties to pay for their schools.
Fast forward to the year 2000. In this Presidential election year,
President
[[Page H8604]]
Clinton has named 10 new national monuments to the delight of hundreds
of important urban activists.
One of the most recent, the Sequoia National Monument, was in my
California congressional district. In spite of an existing ban on
logging within the sequoia groves, and in spite of scientific
recommendations that logging provides critical fire control around the
groves, the administration decided to clear 330,000 acres off limits to
anybody.
They immediately put 220 people in Dinuba, California out of work.
This tragic result has been compounded by the fact that these families
not only lost their primary income, but they also lost their employer-
provided health insurance.
Possibly the worst effect of the Sequoia Monument, however, is that
it has left the Sequoia Monument in the same position as the Bandelier
Monument in Los Alamos, New Mexico. There is a virtual timber box of a
forest, and prescribed burns are now the only way to control it. Just
this year, 75,000 acres burned right next door in the Manter Fire.
So today, at the end of the Clinton administration's sovereignty over
western lands, we find we are still fighting a war on the West.
City folk might be tired of hearing about this, but, Mr. Speaker,
believe me, the people in rural America are exhausted after 8 years of
living with it.
I thank the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Peterson) for yielding
me this time and also for bringing up this most important issue to my
constituents and I think for the country; and that is this
administration's attack on rural life in America.
Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, it is hard to hear any
speech given that they do not talk about urban sprawl today. But one of
the greatest causes of urban sprawl has been the slow methodical
destruction of rural America. The economies, whether it is agriculture,
whether it is mining, whether it is timbering, whether it is
manufacturing, all those things we do in rural America, as they have
been squeezed, and they have been, and made more difficult to
accomplish, young people leave, move to the urban areas, and we have
urban sprawl. Yet, in rural America, the quality of life is
unparalleled, but it is not a quality of life if one cannot have an
income.
{time} 2045
So next I am going to call on my other friend from California who is
going to talk about the fires, another failed policy of this
administration.
Mr. HERGER. Mr. Speaker, I thank my good friend, the gentleman from
Pennsylvania (Mr. Peterson), for leading us in this special hour today
talking about the challenges that we have in rural America, and
particularly the challenges that have been brought about and magnified
because of, regrettably, some of the misguided policies of the Clinton-
Gore administration.
Let me begin by just giving a little background on the district that
I am blessed and honored to represent in northeastern California. It is
some 36,000 square miles, almost 20 percent of the land area of the
State of California on the Nevada-Oregon border, just directly north of
Lake Tahoe; north of Sacramento. There are some parts or all of 11
national forests within this area: Mount Shasta, Mount Lassen, the
Trinity Alps. Again, some of the most beautiful mountain terrain and
beautiful forests anyplace in the world are located in this area that I
represent. Yet we see a tragedy taking place, a tragedy that began
taking place because, I am afraid, of an ignorance within the United
States, and certainly with this administration, on what is happening in
our national forests.
For example, about the turn of the century and beginning in a major
way around 1930, we began eliminating forest fires from our western
forests. And of course our forests in the West are very different than
those on the East Coast because it rains all summer long here. Fire is
not something that people really understand that much on the East
Coast. But on the West Coast we are basically a desert in the
summertime. We have lightning strikes, and fire has historically been a
natural phenomenon. It would be considered a positive phenomenon as
well. But what happened, again in early 1900s, as people began living
in these forest areas, they began preventing all forest fires. Then
what happened is that our forests began to become much denser than they
were historically.
As a matter of fact, the Forest Service has estimated that since
1928, our forests in the West are anywhere from two to four times
denser than they were historically because, again, we have prevented
the natural fires that would burn along and thin out the forests, burn
out the smaller trees, and then we would have larger trees which would
get larger. As a matter of fact, it was estimated that prior to the
arrival of Europeans, there were approximately 25 large trees per acre
in our forests. Today, we literally have hundreds of trees per acre.
Now, what happens today? Today, we see when we have a fire, either by
lightning strike or accidental fire, we see what they call a
catastrophic fire, where the fire begins in the brush area, it moves up
and becomes what is referred to as a fire ladder, where it moves up
into the smaller trees and then up into the very crowns of the big
trees, which historically have lived for hundreds of years, and now we
see the entire forest burn. We actually see where these fires get so
hot, so intense, that the soil itself, the minerals within, are singed
for two to three inches and nothing can grow for several years later. A
catastrophic fire.
Now, what is the Clinton-Gore administration doing about it? Well,
regrettably, not only are we not going in, as has been suggested by
many, that we go in and begin thinning out our forests; that we begin
removing this brush and thinning it out and restoring it more to its
historic level so that we can again have the more normal restorative
fires. By the way, the Native Americans, we know, would set fires.
Again, it was a positive thing. But not today.
We have seen this year one of the worst fire seasons ever. The
Government Accounting Office has estimated that there is some 39
million acres of national forest within the interior West that are at
high risk of catastrophic fire. They also mention in this same report
that it has been estimated that there is a window of only 10 to 25
years that is available for taking effective action before there is
widespread, long-term damage from large-scale fires. That is a direct
quote from the GAO report.
Again, what do we see happening? Nothing. We see nothing happening.
This administration is following what some within the, regrettably, the
extreme environmental community are dictating. For example, the Sierra
Club came out 2 years ago in their public policy stating not a single
tree should be removed from the Federal forest, not even a dead or
dying tree. And, again, we see insect infestations. This is a normal
thing to happen, and it is something that unless we go in and take out
these diseased trees when it is first starting, we will see healthy
trees and an entire forest destroyed. Not even a single tree, even if
it is dead and dying, can be removed so as to remove this incredible
catastrophic fire hazard, according to some within the extreme
environmental community.
Regrettably, and the real tragedy is, that it seems very likely that
were the Vice President, Mr. Gore, to become the President, he would
continue this same policy that we have seen now for 7\1/2\ years into
the next administration, the next 4 years; and we would see more trees
burning.
How many trees have we seen burn? Well, last year some 5.6 million
acres burned across the United States. This year it is already, as of
the first of September, 6.8 million acres have burned. The cost of this
has been $626 million that has been spent; not to restore our forests
to their historic level, but just to fight these catastrophic fires.
And I might mention that the biggest fire was in New Mexico. And,
guess what. The Federal Government set this fire itself. This is what
they called ``a prescribed burn.'' Well, prescribed burn might have
been great if we were a Native American back in the 1800s when there
were only 25 trees per acre. But now, when we have a prescribed burn
and we have these fire ladders, we can see what happens. Again, this
was a tragedy in New Mexico, with hundreds of homes being burned and
many hundreds of homes more threatening to be burned; people's lives
being destroyed.
[[Page H8605]]
In my own district of Lewiston, a town last year, we had 120 homes
burn. The entire community of Lewiston, it was in the national news for
several weeks, was threatened to be burned. That was also a prescribed
burn. Again, I want to mention that prescribed burns might be fine if
we have gone in and restored these forests as they should, but not
certainly as we see them today.
Is there something we can do? Yes. We passed legislation just this
last year, legislation which I authored. I did not write it, but I
authored it here. It was called the Quincy Library Plan. The reason it
was called Quincy Library is because environmentalists and wood
products people and elected officials and community leaders from within
the community of Quincy in northern California, a small town of about
1,200, got together and they thought, well, the only place they would
not yell at each other was in the library. So it was called the Quincy
Library Plan. They came up with a plan using the latest scientific
data, along with all the current laws, put it all together in a plan
specific for their forest.
They came up with this plan, it was voted out of this House virtually
unanimously, passed out of the Senate virtually unanimously, and the
President signed it. This administration refuses to implement it. We
have already been 1 year into it, and this plan has not been
implemented. It was a 5-year pilot program, and they are eating up the
time. This plan, by the way, does not cost taxpayers money. It brings
in $3 of revenue for every $1 that is spent. Maybe this would help some
of the 43 mills that were closed in my district alone in my 10 rural
counties, not because we are short of trees, but because of Federal
legislation that would not allow us to go in and thin out.
Again, there is a tragedy happening in our national forests and to
our environment. No spotted owls can live where a catastrophic fire has
taken place. We need to do something different. I am very pleased with
Governor George W. Bush and his intent to work with us on this.
I thank the gentleman from Pennsylvania for yielding to me.
Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. We have been joined, Mr. Speaker, by
the majority leader, such a delight, and I would like to yield to him
now.
Mr. ARMEY. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman; and I see the he has
more speakers, perhaps a wealth of speakers here, so I will not take
but just a minute or two.
I want to thank the gentleman from Pennsylvania for taking this
special order on a very important subject, and I would like to make
three points that have come to me while I have listened to all of these
speakers. The basic question we are asking here is how do we as a
Nation preserve, utilize, conserve, and develop our resources to
achieve the wealth of a Nation in the lives of our children. It seems
to me it takes a balanced and informed relationship between real
people, who naturally will love their land more than anybody could when
they make their living off it and they live on it, and a government.
I have to say, Mr. Speaker, sometimes the government can do some
downright silly things. Driving through Georgia just a week ago,
looking at the beautiful landscape of Georgia, seeing the damage that
was done by what I call the kudzu government. A lot of my colleagues
may not be familiar with kudzu, but if they were to go to south,
southeast America they will see kudzu. My colleagues who are uninformed
might say, my goodness, that is pretty. But what is kudzu? Kudzu is
something introduced in rural America, in the southeast, ostensibly to
control soil erosion. And what it does is it grows over and smothers
all the natural foliage of the region.
So if anyone has been fortunate enough to have been given kudzu, a
gift from the government, and it has been in their neighborhood for
very long, they know that it has killed everything, even what they
wanted to keep. That is so like the government: comes and shows up and
says, ``I am Mr. Kudzu, I am from the government, I am here to help
you.'' And before we know it, they have smothered and destroyed
everything that is dear to our native regions.
A look at mining reclamation. I wish everybody in America would go
out to our great mining States and see what they are doing in mining in
America today; to see how quickly they take the ore, the coal, out,
extract it, clean up, replace and refill. It is not unusual to see the
mine operating very productively, producing the minerals and the ores
and the energy that we want, and within hundreds of feet we will see
the natural wildlife of the region grazing on what had been, and is
today again, the natural foliage of the region.
Once again, the government of the United States might have been
helpful and encouraging in that. But today it says we are so extreme,
as they did in the Grand Escalante, we will not allow the mining, we
will not allow the reclamation. We will deny the Nation the resources.
One of the great philosophical questions of our lifetime is, If a
tree falls in the forest and nobody is there, will anybody hear it?
Well, if Al Gore becomes President, we might ask the greater question,
and the one that has greater relevance to our life, If a tree falls in
the forest, will anybody clear it? And we just heard a discourse on
that.
There is a place in Idaho, in the district of the gentlewoman from
Idaho (Mrs. Chenoweth-Hage), where you can stand and see that the
environmental extremists allowed an experiment. They allowed somebody
to do the natural, normal, sensible thing that we would all do as we
cleaned up our own backyards and take the fallen trees, the underbrush,
the fire hazard, and clear it. And there is a section right across the
road where that was disallowed. The fire came, and it is not difficult
to see where the fire's devastation ended. It ended where people did
the sensible thing with their land and cleared the fallen trees and
stopped the fire hazard.
{time} 2100
There are many things that we can see in rural America in our
wonderful countryside, resources, wealth, that should be unlocked from
rigid, inflexible, dogmatic Government controls that are naive in their
understanding, innocent of their awareness, and arbitrary in their
implementation.
Let America be what America has been and has built itself from, a
free Nation of real people making a living and living on their own
land.
I think we should return to this subject again soon.
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