[Congressional Record Volume 148, Number 86 (Tuesday, June 25, 2002)]
[Senate]
[Page S5973]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                           WESTERN WILDFIRES

  Mr. CRAIG. Madam President, I rise this morning--and I will return 
tomorrow and the next day--to talk about a story and a saga playing its 
way across the western landscape that you and I watched yesterday and 
on the morning news. We saw the headlines in all of the papers that 
said, Monstrous Wildfires Near Arizona Town; Show Low, Arizona, and The 
Thousands of Citizens Who Live There at Risk.
  What I want to do for a brief period is stage this as the great John 
Wayne movie ``Rio Bravo,'' where John Wayne captures the outlaw Joe 
Bernadette and sticks him in jail waiting for the judge to get the town 
to try the outlaw. It is the saga of the white hats and the black hats.
  For two decades we have been playing the white hat and the black hat 
game when it comes to the management of our western public lands and 
especially the timber lands of the West.
  In the early 1990s, scientists came together and said: ``If we don't 
begin a concerted effort of active management and fuel reduction on the 
floor of western great basin forests, they will burn in wildfire.'' 
That is an exact quote, well over a decade ago, when the experts saw 
that the lack of management and the shutdown of our public lands would 
some day spur us into wildfires.
  Not only did it spur us into wildfires, the scenario those scientists 
did not plug in was that during the decade when we shut the public 
lands down, all in the name of the environment, we began to inhabit 
them. Every little piece of land that was nonpublic got a beautiful 
home built on it, as people wanted to retreat into what we called the 
urban-wildland interface, to have their little piece of that wild west 
that was left staged in the movie of ``Rio Bravo.''
  The great tragedy is, there is no wild west today. It is an 
urbanizing West with thousands of people in it wanting to live in those 
lands that have built up fuel loads on the floor of the forests that 
are equivalent to tens of thousands of gallons of gasoline per acre.
  You and I have seen on the television the last few days the monster 
fire of Arizona that consumed Heber, AZ, that now has taken over 325 
homes, that may take Show Low, AZ, today, rolling on across the 
landscape, burning up those thousands of gallons of equivalent fuel per 
acre on the ground. This is so dramatic, the President flies out today 
to view the carnage.
  It isn't just the homes that are gone. It is the landscape that is 
gone. It is the wildlife habitat. It is the watershed--all gone, not 
for 5 years, not 10 years, but in the arid Southwest gone for 100 
years. Why? Because man in his infinite wisdom said, two or three 
decades ago, all in the name of the environment, that we would no 
longer enter the forests. We would no longer thin the forests. We would 
no longer clean the floors, all in the name of leaving the land alone.
  Now we go to Colorado, Durango, CO, where a fire is just a few miles 
from that beautiful mining town. Between Colorado and Arizona and New 
Mexico, we have lost over 507 homes this year, this spring. It isn't 
even summer yet. It isn't even late summer. It isn't the late July and 
August of the hot weathers of the Great Basin timeframe in which most 
of these lands normally burn.
  If this were a tornado, if this were in Louisiana or across Florida, 
it would have wiped out an entire landscape and thousands of homes or 
hundreds of homes would be gone and we would have a national disaster. 
We would have all kinds of focus on it, how tragic it is. But somehow 
this has gotten less attention, even though the West is filled with 
smoke today.
  It should never have become a white hat/black hat issue. But for two 
decades, it became that. Right here on the floor of the Senate that 
very issue got debated. It was them versus us, the chain saw versus 
Bambi. Bambi won. Now Bambi is losing. Bambi's home is gone. The place 
she sleeps is gone. The place she drinks her water is gone. The 
wildlife are in danger--in an area in Arizona where two fires came 
together, over 300,000 acres. That is an area that is 500 miles square, 
as big as the whole L.A. Basin. If that is not a national disaster, I 
don't know what is. That is just Arizona.

  Madam President, 1.5 million acres have all burned in the Great Basin 
West this year, and here we are just in the last days of June. At this 
time in 2000, 7.3 million acres burned in the West, and we have already 
forgotten about it; we had only burned 1.2 million acres.
  Well, the story will be continued. Let's call this ``Rio Bravo.'' 
Let's call this a time when America comes together to refocus its 
intent on public land policy. I am going to be back with charts and 
maps tomorrow to visit with my colleagues about this national crisis 
that burns its way across the landscape of Arizona, New Mexico, and 
Colorado because what I am fearful of is, come late August, it will be 
in my home State of Idaho, which lost a million acres of land in 2000, 
and nobody talked about it because it was in the back country and with 
no homes burned. There was no national television coverage to watch a 
smoldering home. But Bambi lost her home, and Bambi's cousins lost 
their homes, and a million acres in Idaho today will be decades in 
coming back.
  So why don't we get real and recognize that in managing our public 
lands there must be a balance. It cannot be either/or or all or nothing 
because when that happens, Mother Nature is not always the best steward 
of the land. Today in Arizona, Mother Nature is making headlines and 
she is calling herself Monster Wildfire. That is Mother Nature, but not 
in her finest hour.

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