[Congressional Record Volume 166, Number 27 (Monday, February 10, 2020)]
[Senate]
[Pages S960-S961]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]





                     TRIBUTE TO DR. WALLY COVINGTON

  Ms. McSALLY. Mr. President, I rise today to recognize one of the most 
influential and well-known forest ecologists in the Nation, Dr. Wally 
Covington of Flagstaff, AZ.
  Last month, Dr. Covington retired from his current position as 
regents' professor at the School of Forestry and the executive director 
of the Ecological Restoration Institute at Northern Arizona University.
  When we talk about the wildfire crisis afflicting the West, we 
frequently reference the need to thin our forests of the enormous 
number of small, dead, and dying trees that have fueled some of 
largest, deadliest, and most destructive mega fires ever seen in the 
United States.
  In my home State of Arizona, about one-quarter of our pine forests 
have been impacted by fire over the past two decades. In 2011, the 
largest wildfire in State history, the Wallow Fire, incinerated over a 
half million acres in a matter of weeks before finally burning out. And 
a nation mourned the loss of 19 brave wildland firefighters from 
Prescott, AZ, who gave their lives battling the Yarnell Hill Fire in 
2013.
  These fires burn so hot and fast that they barrel through rural 
communities, insatiably consuming property in its path and, sometimes, 
human life too.
  We recognize that the fuel load is too high in many forests and that 
prescribed fires and fuel breaks alone are not enough to prevent mega-
fires that crown atop forest canopies.
  Today, it is common sense that our fire-prone public lands need to be 
restored to their natural, fire-adapted state. It is difficult to 
imagine how this conventional wisdom shared across both sides of the 
aisle, and among the timber industry and environmental groups alike, 
was foreign, controversial, and, frankly, heretical only two decades 
ago. It was Dr. Covington's applied research in forest ecology and his 
tireless advocacy that showed us how reducing tree density through 
timber harvesting is not only beneficial, but also necessary if we want 
to reduce the threat of catastrophic wildfires.
  So when we talk about forest thinning, the country should know just 
how influential Dr. Wally Covington's contributions were to the 
practice of forest ecosystem restoration.
  Let me share a little bit of Dr. Covington's story with you. From a 
young age, Wally was exposed to the wonders of the great outdoors by 
his parents who first met and fell in love in Flagstaff. They instilled 
in him a profound appreciation for nature and a humbling perspective on 
humanity's impact on the land. At his father's urging, Wally studied 
the works of conservationist Aldo Leopold, who is regarded as the 
founder of the wilderness preservation movement and the philosophy of 
``land ethics,'' which espouses the belief that man is not a conqueror 
of his environment, but a unique component of it.
  Later, Wally graduated from the University of North Texas with a 
degree in biology, and he planned to become a physician in pediatric 
oncology. However, the emotional toll of working with children with 
cancer left Wally disheartened. He departed medical school never to 
return. Still, that heart-wrenching experience taught Wally that he was 
a healer.
  Shaped by the burgeoning environmental movement of the 1970s, Wally 
answered another calling. He decided to pursue a master's in ecology 
from the University of New Mexico. It wasn't long before Wally's 
academic achievements led him to Yale University where he earned a 
doctorate in forestry in 1976.
  Dr. Covington was already an accomplished forest ecologist by the 
time he joined NAU. At Yale, he developed an innovative theory for 
predicting the carbon budgets of unharvested forests, a calculation 
known as ``Covington's curve'' that is still widely used in modern 
forestry.
  His next achievement, however, would transform how we view and manage 
our forestlands. For some time, Wally had been studying ponderosa pine 
trees, a type of evergreen species that dominates the landscape in the 
West. These iconic conifers span more than 27 million acres in the 
United States. Wally observed that our Nation's pine forests were out 
of balance, unhealthy, and highly susceptible to drought, insect 
infestation, and disease. A majority of the mega-fires or 
``conflagrations'' impacting northern California, Montana, Arizona, and 
elsewhere were occurring in ponderosa pine forests.
  As a forest ecologist, Wally understood that fire plays a natural 
role in our forests. Historically, in North America, low intensity 
ground fire led to large, mature pine trees and forests that are 
naturally adapted to withstand fire. But modern wildfires in the West 
were now burning with such ferocious intensity that even the sturdiest 
of pine trees would literally boil to the point of exploding. Postfire 
conditions were no longer the regenerative force that ecologists had 
once studied. Soils were damaged, taking years to replenish their 
nutrients, and watersheds were more likely to experience long-term 
flooding and erosion.
  Wally once poignantly described the situation in an article he 
authored in the journal Nature in 2002: ``The dry forest ecosystems of 
the American West, especially those once dominated by open ponderosa 
pine forests, are in widespread collapse. We are now witnessing sudden 
leaps in aberrant ecosystem behavior long predicted by ecologists and 
conservation professionals. Trends over the past half-century show that 
the frequency, intensity and size of wildfires will increase--by orders 
of magnitude--the loss of biological diversity, property and human 
lives for many generations to come.''
  Like any good healer, Dr. Covington worked tirelessly to diagnose the 
illness and devise a cure. As part of his research, Wally pored through 
historical records, old photographs, and land surveys dating back to 
the turn of the century. He listened to Native American Tribal members, 
the first inhabitants of our forests, who shared stories told and 
retold through the generations about elk and deer hunts in open 
canopied forests teeming with bountiful grasslands. Wally discovered 
that, in a very short time, about 50 years, the forest landscape of the 
West had substantially changed.
  He hypothesized, correctly, that man's presence had transformed our 
once fire-adapted, low-density forests into overstocked tinderboxes. 
Before there was a Forest Service, before westward expansion brought 
pioneers and homesteaders, the land, he estimated, supported around 50 
to 100 pine trees per acre. In contrast, today's modern forests host 
roughly 300 percent more trees--sometimes as much as 1,000 trees per 
acre--a number far greater than the natural ecosystem can support. This 
meant that the West was overloaded with a dangerous amount of kindling 
fuel.
  To prove his theory, Wally ran experiments. Beginning in 1992, on a 
modest 10-acre parcel of Forest Service land in the Gus Pearson Natural 
Area, Wally established three test plots. The first plot was used as 
the control, its post-settlement state preserved as-is. The second plot 
was thinned of excess pine trees. On the third plot, the trees were 
thinned to simulate pre-settlement conditions and then subjected to 
prescribed fire, the kind of controlled burns routinely used by the 
Forest Service to clear our low-lying fuels from the forest floor.
  His test showed that fire behavior dramatically decreased on the plot 
that was thinned. Trees didn't suffer the same trauma found on the 
other two plots and in fact responded positively by producing increased 
resin, which meant increased resistance to bark beetle infestation. 
Also, the number of species and amount of native grasses and plants 
increased improving both forage and habitat quality. Wally had 
successfully conducted the first science-based forest restoration 
project in history.
  Dr. Covington took his findings to Congress, the Department of the 
Interior, the Forest Service, and the National Academy of Sciences. He 
met with Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt under the Clinton 
administration and, later, Secretary Gale Norton under the George W. 
Bush administration, to convince them to implement forest restoration 
treatments. In many of his meetings, he would echo the old adage, ``an 
ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.''
  They listened, and Congress listened, as did my Arizona predecessors 
in the Senate. In 2003, he worked with Senator Jon Kyl to enact 
legislation like the Health Forests Restoration Act and also 
established the congressionally chartered Southwest Ecological

[[Page S961]]

Restoration Institutes at NAU, Colorado State University, and New 
Mexico Highlands University, which assist the Forest Service in 
developing restoration projects across millions of acres of land.
  Today, the Forest Service and the Department of the Interior are 
working to mechanically thin millions of acres of forestlands across 
the West to make our forests more resilient to fire. It is a slow, 
expensive, and time-consuming prospect to reverse 50 years of forest 
mismanagement across a territory as vast as the United States, but the 
reward is worth it. In doing so, we are saving our forests, our homes, 
and human lives.
  I cannot overstate Dr. Covington's tremendous contribution to the 
field of forest ecology. Had it not been for Wally's work, his 
compassion for healing our unhealthy forests, and his drive to educate 
policymakers on the sound science behind forest restoration, I suspect 
our forests would be in far worse shape today. I am proud to recognize 
Dr. Covington, a fellow Arizonan. Our Nation owes Wally a debt of 
gratitude that we can never repay.

                          ____________________