[Congressional Record Volume 166, Number 165 (Wednesday, September 23, 2020)]
[House]
[Pages H4719-H4720]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                   NEED FOR ACTIVE FOREST MANAGEMENT

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
California (Mr. McClintock) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. McCLINTOCK. Mr. Speaker, last week, President Trump came to 
California to be briefed on the horrific fires now raging in that 
State. Instead, he got a lecture from Governor Newsom and his staff on 
climate change.
  Well, if Gavin Newsom actually believes that if we all just ride our 
bikes to work and set our thermostats to 80 degrees that these 
wildfires will go away, then he is completely delusional.
  Excess timber comes out of the forest in only two ways: It is either 
carried out or it burns out. For most of the 20th century, we carried 
it out. It is called logging.
  Every year, the U.S. Forest Service foresters would mark off excess 
timber, and then we auctioned it off to lumber companies that paid us 
to remove it, funding both local communities and the forest service. We 
auctioned grazing contracts on our grasslands. The result was healthy 
forests, fewer fires, and a thriving economy.
  But beginning in the 1970s, we began imposing environmental laws that 
have made the management of our lands all but impossible. Draconian 
restrictions on logging, grazing, prescriptive burning, and herbicide 
use on public lands have made modern land management endlessly time 
consuming and, ultimately, cost prohibitive. A single tree thinning 
plan typically requires 4 years and more than 800 pages of analysis. 
The costs of this process exceed the value of timber, turning land 
maintenance from a revenue-generating activity to a revenue-consuming 
one.
  Since 1980, these laws have produced an 80 percent decline in timber 
harvested off of the Federal forests and a concomitant increase in 
acreage destroyed by fire. In California, the number of sawmills has 
declined from 149 to just 27.
  Now, these laws were passed with the promise they would improve the 
forests. Well, after more than four decades, I think we are entitled to 
ask: How are the forests doing?
  An untended forest is just like an untended garden. It will grow and 
grow until it chokes itself to death. In a morbidly overcrowded State, 
stressed trees fall victim to disease, pestilence, drought, and, 
ultimately, catastrophic wildfire. In many regions of the Sierra, 
timber density is now four times greater than the land can support.
  We have been trying for years to reform these laws, resume active 
forest management, and restore our forests to health; yet the 
environmental leftists have blocked us every year. Instead, politicians 
use the excuse of climate change.
  Really? These environmental laws generally apply only to public 
lands. Today, you can easily tell the boundaries between private and 
public lands solely on the condition of the forests. How clever of the 
climate only to decimate the public lands.
  The climate has changed much over the centuries, but the problem has 
not. When Juan Cabrillo dropped anchor in Santa Monica Bay in October 
of 1542, the height of the Santa Ana fire season, he named it the Bay 
of Smoke. Before western civilization, paleontologists tell us that we 
lost between 4 and 12 million acres a year to wildfire in California.
  Modern forests and land management brought that destruction down to 
just a quarter of a million acres during the 20th century. That annual 
destruction is now back up to 3 million acres a year.
  That is not a new normal; that is the old normal reasserting itself. 
That is not climate change; that is how nature deals with overgrown 
lands. And once destroyed, it can take centuries for our forests to 
regrow.
  We began active forest management to break that cycle. We decided we 
wanted every generation to enjoy our forests. So we introduced 
scientific forest management to do a little gardening and keep our 
forests healthy by suppressing brush and harvesting excess timber so it 
couldn't crowd itself to death. And it worked, until the environmental 
laws abandoned science for ideology.

[[Page H4720]]

  The planet has been warming and cooling for millennia. Warmer 
temperatures make it all the more important to match tree density to 
the ability of the land to support it. That means more logging, not 
less.
  California has taken draconian measures to reduce carbon dioxide 
emissions, at a terrible cost for the quality of life of Californians. 
We now suffer some of the highest costs for energy in the country; we 
have destroyed our manufacturing base; and we can't guarantee enough 
electricity to keep our refrigerators running. Yet a single 
catastrophic fire makes a mockery of all of these laws and the 
sacrifices they impose on our people.
  Governor Newsom says he has no patience for such views. Well, that is 
a tragedy for all Californians and for all of California's forests.

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