Forestry Policy

Floor Speech

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Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, I am speaking in morning business with my colleague and friend Senator Merkley to talk about forestry policy and to give the Senate a little bit of an update on where we are because we have so many resource-dependent communities that have been devastated as a result of a variety of policies. I want to touch briefly, and then yield to Senator Merkley, on what some of those elements are.

No. 1 is that our softwood lumber producers are now in a titanic battle with the Canadians, fighting the Canadian system of heavily subsidizing their industry, thereby cutting ours. A group of 25 Senators--a quarter of the Senate--have joined me in an effort so that our trade representative pushes back and continues to fight this unjust, inequitable system until we no longer see Oregon and American jobs destroyed as a result of the Canadians' unfairly subsidizing their industry.

No. 2, we feel very strongly about getting the harvest up in a sustainable fashion. We know there is an awful lot of work to do in the woods. We can do it with an environmental ethic, with an ethic of forest health, and I strongly support that. I have introduced legislation to do that in my home State and have been supportive of colleagues' efforts to do it in their parts of the country.

The reality is--and the Forest Service has said this--you would have to increase logging on our public lands by 400 percent in order to no longer need a third leg of the forestry stool, which is the Secure Rural Schools program.

I want it understood that we are going to push back against inequitable trade practices that are hurting jobs in rural Oregon and rural America. We are going to support increasing the harvest in a sustainable fashion, but there is no realistic increase that might possibly win passage here in Washington and be upheld legally that involves taking the harvest up to 400 percent. You are going to need a safety net.

Senator Merkley and I, Senator Crapo, Senator Risch, and many colleagues on both sides of the aisle have fought to get this program, which has now expired, extended for one more year. This program began in 2000 as a result of a bipartisan piece of legislation, which Senator Craig and I authored, called the Secure Rural Schools bill. It now benefits more than 700 counties, and we see it benefiting communities all over the country. This program is depended on for education. It is depended on for roads. It is depended on in many areas for law enforcement. Unfortunately, our colleagues have not been willing to extend it. Senator Merkley and I, and Senator Crapo and Senator Risch, in a bipartisan way, have wanted to work in the Senate to get this extended, but to put these vital county payments on the back burner would be an enormous mistake.

I want to yield the remainder of our time to my friend and colleague, but there are really three legs to this stool: fight unfair trade practices, get the harvest up in a sustainable kind of fashion, and understand that you are not going to be able to meet the needs of hard- hit rural communities without the safety net program--the Secure Rural Schools program.

Senator Crapo, Senator Risch, Senator Merkley, and I are going to keep coming back here again and again until we get it reauthorized.

I yield the remainder of our time to Senator Merkley.

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Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, I am going to wrap this up simply by saying a program like this has generated a tremendous amount of community involvement. There are advisory committees that bring the industry and environmental folks together. That is what we are going to need to get this job done right. It is called collaborative forestry. The Secure Rural Schools program is something that Senator Merkley and I want to reauthorize. It is a textbook case for what you want to do for collaborative forestry.

We didn't even really get into forest health because we all know our forests, particularly in the West, are burning up, so Senator Risch, Senator Crapo, and I went into something called fire borrowing, which is an extraordinarily inefficient policy that discourages prevention with respect to fire.

We are going to be back to talk about the nuts and bolts of sensible forest policy. We need to build on this collaborative effort, as we have sought to do in our O&C bill--the bill that Senator Merkley and I have been involved with--which will double the harvest, on average, for the next 50 years, according to the experts. We want it to be understood that we are going to be fighting on a number of fronts. We will fight with respect to the trade policy, which is long overdue, as it relates to getting a fair shake for our softwood lumber producers and value-added forestry. We are going to focus on collaborative approaches and get the harvest up in a sustainable way.

Senator Merkley has talked about the promise of Secure Rural Schools,
and I feel it is very regrettable that when Senator Crapo and Senator Risch tried to convince the other side of the aisle to accept Secure Rural Schools now, we couldn't get it done.

I think anybody who knows us knows we are persistent, and you don't get anything important done without bipartisan support. That is the way we will approach our forestry policy in the days ahead.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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