[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 148 (2002), Part 8]
[Senate]
[Pages 11502-11503]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                          THE TRAGEDY OUT WEST

  Mr. CRAIG. Madam President, I come to the floor one more time this 
week to speak about the tragedies in the West

[[Page 11503]]

as they play out. While my time is limited this morning, I thought it 
was important that I talk about the human side of this tragedy.
  Let me read this wire story about Jackie Nelson of Globe, AZ, driving 
her pickup into a makeshift shelter yesterday morning to try to find 
food for a 7-month-old granddaughter of hers. She left her home on a 
hillside in Arizona to burn in the wildfires that play out there. She 
does not know whether she will go home to that home or whether she will 
literally be adrift and have to seek shelter from public sources.
  The article goes on to say:

       That lament resounded across the West today, as 18 large 
     blazes burned in six states, consuming acreage at a pace 
     roughly double the 10-year average.

  The reason I want to talk about that very briefly, as I did yesterday 
morning, is that today in the West over 2.5 million acres of public 
land have now been charred into a smoldering rubble--homes, beautiful 
wildlife habitat, timbered acreages--that simply we forgot because the 
public policy of this country said, over a decade ago: Leave the land 
to Mother Nature and walk away. And in our walking away, in the pursuit 
of the environment, Mother Nature took charge.
  Today, Mother Nature rules the West, and her mode of operation is a 
monstrous wildfire consuming the public timber reserves of the West, 
the wildlife habitat, and the watershed.
  To put in context 2.5 million acres having burned currently, on the 
same date in 2000--a year when we burned over 7.3 million acres, in 
2000--at this point in time, we had only burned 1.2 million acres. So 
today we have already burned double what we burned by this time in 
2000. And 2000 was the worst in recorded history of fires on public 
lands.
  Why is this happening? Again, neglect. Again, an irresponsible public 
policy that took people off the land and did not allow us to manage it 
in wise and responsible ways for all of the multiple-use values we hold 
dear to our public lands.
  It is a tragedy of nature. It is a tragedy we have made. It is a 
tragedy we can solve. We well ought to solve it by a much more prudent 
public policy. But it will take decades now to begin to reverse what we 
have allowed to happen.
  Where there were once 150 trees per acre in the public forests, today 
there are 400 or 500 trees per acre, oftentimes growing like weeds, and 
resulting in equivalent Btu's of 10,000 to 15,000 to 20,000 gallons of 
gasoline per acre. And when the temperature is right, and the humidity 
is right, and the drought is running rampant across the Southwest, as 
it is today, we set in motion the ``perfect storm,'' only in this case 
it is the perfect firestorm that has now consumed nearly 500 homes in 
Colorado, in Arizona, and in New Mexico. And our summer, our fire 
summer--the long hot summer in the West--has just begun.
  I yield the floor.

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