[Congressional Record Volume 148, Number 85 (Monday, June 24, 2002)]
[Senate]
[Pages S5945-S5947]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                        FOREST FIRES IN ARIZONA

  Mr. KYL. Madam President, I rise to speak on the crisis pending 
before the whole State of Arizona.
  Arizona has never had a tragedy like this Rodeo fire. It has now 
consumed an area 10 times the size of the District of Columbia. It has 
burned at least 200 homes, probably more. We can't go back into areas 
that have been burned because it is still too hot. It has destroyed a 
lot more buildings than that, and animals, both domestic and a lot of 
the animals that populate our beautiful forests.
  People who are not familiar with Arizona might not understand how 
there can be a forest fire in Arizona. But the world's largest 
ponderosa pine forest stretches from the Grand Canyon into New Mexico, 
across a rather wide swath of Arizona at an elevation of about 7,000 
feet. It is beautiful country, with pine trees, aspen, fir, spruce, 
lakes, rivers--not the kind of environment you would ordinarily 
associate with Arizona. It is a place to which many Arizonans repair 
during the summer when it is very warm ``down in the valley,'' as we 
call it. It contains some of the most interesting and unique habitat in 
the United States--habitat, both flora and fauna, which is not 
preserved by wildfire but is absolutely and utterly destroyed.

  You might be interested to know that an area not far from this--
75,000 acres--burned a couple years ago, and it was the largest black 
bear habitat in the whole United States. When you think of Arizona, 
think of habitat for an enormous variety of animals, including fish and 
birds, that has now been destroyed by this fire. We have the Apache 
golden trout, which, at great pains and at great cost, the Apache 
Indian tribe and the U.S. Government have tried for years to bring back 
to the area of the White Mountain Apache Indian Reservation and 
surrounding areas. It has been dealt a huge setback because of the fire 
that has gone through the area which this trout ordinarily populates. 
The erosion that will come from the devastation caused by this fire 
will clog the streams, and it is unlikely, I have heard today, that the 
Apache trout will be able to make a comeback in this area.
  I am sure there are many other species--the gosant, just to mention 
one--that will be devastated as a result of this fire.
  Yet it is interesting that some of the radical environmentalists in 
our country are the very ones who are responsible for preventing the 
kind of management of our forests that might have prevented this 
devastation. Their view is that man should not touch the forest. As one 
of them was reported as saying today: If the price for that is a 
500,000-acre fire with an entire town like Show Low, AZ, devastated, 
then so be it; that is the way it should be. That is a misreading of 
history and science.
  A century ago, before we overgrazed the area, and before we employed 
a policy of fighting all of the fires, fire regularly burned through 
our beautiful ponderosa pine forests. We had, about every 7 years, a 
small fire that would burn the ``fuel'' on the ground and a few of the 
smaller trees, but it could not hurt the great big, beautiful trees--
maybe 50, or 60, or 70, or 80 per acre. Now we have 3,000 trees per 
acre, or more, because we have suppressed the fires and the grazing has 
resulted not in more grass growing but all of these seedlings growing.
  If you look at a lot of these forests in Arizona today, instead of 
the big sequoia trees, which is what the mature ponderosas look like, 
you see what is called a ``dog-haired thicket,'' which is a forest so 
thick with stunted, little--frankly, ugly--trees and brush that they 
say a dog cannot even run through without losing half of his hair. It 
is hard to walk through these forests; they are so thick with this 
``fuel,'' as the Forest Service people call it.
  What happens when there is a lightning strike or a man-caused fire, 
as in this case? Instead of burning around the ground, licking at the 
base of these big trees--and they shrug it off--it roars throughout the 
underbrush and climbs up the ladder of the smaller trees, up through 
the higher trees, and finally the superheated structure at top of the 
trees explodes into flame, and the flames swirl, creating air currents, 
and even affecting the weather. The fire then races across the top of 
the forest, devastating everything in its path. The heat is so intense, 
the soil is sterilized and the waxes from the needles that ordinarily 
don't bother the forest floor melt and literally create a coating on 
the floor. The rains that may someday come--although we have not had 
any for a long time--will wash the unprotected soil into the streams, 
creating huge erosion problems, and it will be a hundred years before 
this forest once again looks like it did a week ago.

  That is just the impact on the forest itself. The other fauna--
various varieties of animals, birds, fish, and insects--are destroyed. 
That is not to mention the human tragedy. The elderly people who moved 
to these communities, because they are retirement and recreation 
communities, don't want to leave their homes. A family I heard about 
saw the pictures and saw that their outbuildings had been burned, and 
they had no idea whether their own home was still standing. The town of 
Show Low, with 30,000-plus people, was evacuated. Every one of the 
citizens was forced to leave town. The fire is within the town limits, 
and it has been there for basically a day now, as the firemen from our 
State and from other places in the country are battling to keep it from 
totally destroying that town.
  Almost as bad, immediately to the south of town there is basically a 
clear path of forest, tinderbox dry, all the way to New Mexico that 
would literally devastate the entire Apache-

[[Page S5946]]

Sitgreaves Forest, which I consider to be some of the most beautiful 
country in the world. Our own summer cabin is in those mountains. I 
know the area. I have hiked it. I love it.
  It is a tragedy of unspeakable proportion that we have allowed a 
condition to endure that created this much devastation. To give you an 
idea of the magnitude, a person not from Arizona was asked to describe 
it, or try to characterize it, provide an objective description. He 
thought for a long time and finally said:

       I have seen one thing worse, Mount St. Helens.

  Now, could this have been prevented? The answer is, probably so--at 
least to the order of magnitude of this devastation. We have known for 
a long time that it is possible to manage our forests by going into 
these densely populated forests, mechanically thinning them--that is to 
say, removing all the little trees I spoke of in the brush, the downed 
trees, and so on, mechanically moving most of it; and then during 
October and November, when it is cool and wet, you burn what is left 
during a prescribed burn, which is very safe, so that the following 
spring grasses crop up. And what we have found by research done out of 
the Northern Arizona University--primarily by Wally Covington and his 
group--is that the number of species of butterflies and birds and 
animals of all kinds, by orders of magnitude, return to the area and 
the protein content of the grass is great. The antelope, deer, and elk 
want to get there to graze. Also, the pitch content of the trees is 
improved so the bark beetles cannot get in and cause the trees to die. 
It looks so much better. Instead of this tangled mass of little trees 
and brush, which I talked about before, you have beautiful, big trees 
that, as I say, look like the sequoias in California, and which are 
much healthier as a result of the fact that they are not competing with 
so many little trees for the nutrients in the water and the soil.
  It can be done by thinning and taking out that dead brush and then, 
in appropriate cases, doing a prescribed burn as well. After that, 
nature can take its course. When you have a lightning strike 5, 6, 7 
years later, what happens? It burns along the ground. It will burn the 
grass and some of the stumps that are left, but it will not crown to 
the top of these trees, creating the devastating fires we have seen.

  Why haven't we been able to do that? I am sorry to say it is a 
combination of a lot of factors, but most of it goes back to one 
central problem: There are radical environmentalists who don't agree 
with this. Most mainstream environmentalists understand that this so-
called ecological restoration is exactly what our forests need, and 
they are willing to support it. Yes, there are quibbles about, do you 
cut 16-inch or 24-inch diameter trees, but the concept is agreed to.
  Some of the radicals are so afraid that there will be any commercial 
timber operation left standing in this country--and there is none in 
Arizona to speak of anymore--but they are so afraid somebody might make 
a little bit of money cutting timber commercially that they will do 
anything to prevent anybody from getting into the forest to cut trees; 
thus, our roadless policy, and thus, 5,000 appeals to Forest Service 
actions seeking to go into our forests and provide this kind of 
management. Between 40 and 50 percent of the Forest Service budget is 
devoted to dealing with these legal challenges.
  Think about that for a moment. Talk about a litigious society. 
Between 40 and 50 percent of the Forest Service budget is devoted to 
these administrative and legal challenges to moving forward with this 
management. Part of the fault is Congress. We have written laws that 
are so open-ended and unclear that it is very easy for radical 
environmentalists to find something wrong and challenge one of these 
proposed management programs.
  Bureaucrats make mistakes. It is always easy to stop a project. It is 
very difficult to move these projects forward, as a result of which a 
lot of Forest Service people have essentially given up. I have asked 
them and they say: Why should we propose any more? We will get stopped, 
and we don't have enough personnel to fight this in court or in the 
administrative process.
  There is plenty of blame to go around. We tried to get more funding 
in the Congress, and, frankly, my colleagues have not been all that 
supportive. We tried to get support from this administration and the 
past administration. Again, we could have had a whole lot more help 
than we have received.
  To its credit, this administration only had one budget, and I am 
hopeful that as a result of this--the Secretary of the Interior I know 
is strongly committed to this kind of management, as is the head of the 
Forest Service. I am hopeful that as unfortunate as the Rodeo fire is--
and, by the way, the Chediski fire--might stimulate both the 
administration and my colleagues in the Congress to support more 
meaningful management practices.
  I spoke with friends on the other side of the aisle who are anxious 
to help in this regard because all the Western States have the same 
environment. The ponderosa forest is a little different than other 
forests. They have their own nuances but generally the concept is 
pretty much the same.
  We need to do three things. We need to, first, provide whatever 
supplemental funding is necessary to deal with the crisis that is here 
today. The Forest Service long ago spent all the money we gave it to 
fight fires. We are just entering the fire season. We have to replenish 
those accounts and get more money into the Departments of Agriculture 
and Interior.
  Second, we have to in next year's budget provide adequate funding for 
the implementation of a forest plan that provides this management on a 
large-scale basis. The General Accounting Office said 3 years ago that 
we have to treat 35 million acres in a 15- to 20-year period or these 
forests will be lost forever through disease and burning. Now it is 
down to about 30 million because about 4 million of those have burned. 
But we still have a job and less time within which to do it. We need to 
devote the resources that are necessary, and that will mean spending 
some money.

  Third, we will have to change some of the laws to provide for more 
expedited procedures to get these plans approved and to make it more 
difficult for frivolous objections to prevail or to slow up the 
process. If these plans are done in accordance with commonly accepted 
good management practices, then the burden should be on those opposing 
the sale to prove why the sale should not go forward.
  When I use the term ``sale,'' I want to be very specific. We do not 
have enough money in this country to treat these forests without 
commercial enterprise. I have gotten a little bit of money each year to 
support Northern Arizona University and the research people in Denver 
who hire AmeriCorps volunteers and grad students at the university to 
go out during the summer and do some of the work by hand. They can 
treat a few hundred acres doing that, but they cannot do a large area 
treatment that the GAO said is necessary. That is why we are going to 
need commercial enterprises to clear the forest of the debris, the fuel 
about which we are talking.
  Somebody might make a little bit of money doing that, but it is not 
going to be by taking out the big trees that all of us want to 
preserve. It will be by having enough wood for fiber board, plywood, 
and a few poles for cabinet construction, for example. There may be a 
little bit of lumber but not very much.
  Those are the actions we are going to have to undertake in the next 
few days to begin to deal with this situation. The one way we can begin 
to repair what has occurred and to keep faith with the people who have 
lost their homes and their livelihood, their livestock, and, frankly, 
the people of this great Nation who have now lost a tremendous resource 
of almost half a million acres in Arizona, one way we can help to make 
this right is to see it does not happen again. We can do that by 
implementing sound management that begins to restore our forests to the 
way God created them and the way they can be preserved if we will but 
treat them as we would treat anything that belongs to us in our own 
yard or in our own garden.
  We would never hope to have a successful garden without ever weeding 
it, and there has been a parallel made of our forests to our gardens. 
To keep it healthy, one has to weed it every now and then. That is not 
unnatural. In fact, it is a very natural way of dealing with our 
forests.

[[Page S5947]]

  Madam President, I join all who have expressed sympathies and best 
wishes for the people who have suffered as a result of this fire. I 
appreciate all the comments that have been made to me, expressions of 
concern and support. I am absolutely delighted President Bush is going 
to be flying to Arizona tomorrow to this little town of Show Low whose 
Fourth of July parade I do not think I have missed now in about 15 
years. It is a beautiful little town. I know the people of Show Low and 
of northeast Arizona will appreciate the President's visit, and I know 
it will be on behalf of all of us that he visits there and expresses 
our sympathies and concerns and hope for the future as a result of our 
ability to join together and engage in sound management practice.
  I support what he is doing. I regret I cannot join him. I know he 
would ask us to do the work here in response to this important Defense 
authorization bill.
  I ask unanimous consent to print in the Record a Wall Street Journal 
editorial of Friday, June 21.
  There being no objection, the editorial was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

             [From The Wall Street Journal, June 21, 2002]

                           Review and Outlook


                           the fire this time

       In December 1995, a storm hit the Six Rivers National 
     Forest in northern California, tossing dead trees across 
     35,000 acres and creating dangerous fire conditions. For 
     three years local U.S. Forest Service officials labored to 
     clean it up, but they were blocked by environmental groups 
     and federal policy. In 1999 the time bomb blew: A fire roared 
     over the untreated land and 90,000 more acres.
       Bear this anecdote in mind as you watch the 135,000-acre 
     Hayman fire now roasting close to Denver. And bear it in mind 
     the rest of this summer, in what could be the biggest 
     marshmallow-toasting season in half a century. Because 
     despite the Sierra Club spin, catastrophic fires like the 
     Hayman are not inevitable, or good. They stem from bad forest 
     management--which found a happy home in the Clinton 
     Administration.
       In a briefing to Congress last week, U.S. Forest chief Dale 
     Bosworth finally sorted the forest from the tree-huggers. He 
     said that if proper forest-management had been implemented 10 
     years ago, and if the agency weren't in the grip of 
     ``analysis paralysis'' from environmental regulation and 
     lawsuits, the Hayman fire wouldn't be raging like an inferno.
       Mr. Bosworth also presented Congress with a sobering report 
     on our national forests. Of the 192 million acres the Forest 
     Service administraters, 73 million are at risk from severe 
     fire. Tens of millions of acres are dying from insects and 
     diseases. Thousands of miles of roads, critical to fighting 
     fires, are unusable. Those facts back up a General Accounting 
     Office report, which estimates that one in three forest acres 
     is dead or dying. So much for the green mantra of ``healthy 
     ecosystems.''
       How did one of America's great resources come to such a 
     pass? Look no further than the greens who trouped into power 
     with the last Administration. Senior officials adopted an 
     untested philosophy known as ``ecosystem management,'' a 
     bourgeois bohemian plan to return forests to their 
     ``natural'' state. The Clintonites cut back timber harvesting 
     by 80% and used laws and lawsuits to put swathes of land off-
     limits to commercial use.
       We now see the results. Millions of acres are choked with 
     dead wood, infected trees and underbrush. Many areas have 
     more than 400 tons of dry fuel per acre--10 times manageable 
     level. This is tinder that turns small fires into infernos, 
     outrunning fire control and killing every fuzzy endangered 
     animal in sight. In 2000 alone fires destroyed 8.4 million 
     acres, the worst fire year since the 1950s. Some 800 
     structures were destroyed--many as a fire swept across Los 
     Alamos, New Mexico--and control and recovery costs neared $3 
     billion. The Forest Service's entire budget is $4.9 billion.
       That number, too, is important. Before the Clinton 
     Administration limited timber sales, U.S. forests helped pay 
     for their own upkeep. Selective logging cleaned up grounds 
     and paid for staff, forestry stations, cleanup and roads. 
     Today, with green groups blocking timber sales at every turn, 
     the GAO says taxpayers will have to spend $12 billion to cart 
     off dead wood.
       It's no accident that two of the main Clinton culprits--
     former director of Fish & Wildlife Jamie Rappaport Clark and 
     former Forest Service boss Michael Dombeck--have both landed 
     at the National Wildlife Federation, which broadcasts across 
     its Internet homepage, ``Fires Are Good.''
       Fixing all of this won't be easy. After 30 years of 
     environmental regulation, the Forest Service now spends 40% 
     of its time in ``planning and assessment.'' Even the smallest 
     project takes years. Mr. Bosworth has identified the 
     problems, but fixing them will require White House leadership 
     and Congressional cooperation.
       One solution would be to follow the lead of private timber 
     companies, whose forests don't tend to suffer such 
     catastrophic fires. Their trees are an investment; they can't 
     afford to let them burn. Americans should feel the same way 
     about theirs.

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