Fix Our Forests Act
Floor Speech
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Mr. BENTZ. Mr. Chairman, I thank Chair Westerman for the work he has done in creating the Fix Our Forests Act.
The path to solving any problem starts with an understanding of scale. The Western United States has millions upon millions of acres of trees, over 85 million acres of forests on the West Coast alone. In my State of Oregon, there are 30 million acres; Washington, 22.5 million; and California, 33 million. There are 85 million acres of forest, 132,000 square miles, an area bigger than New Mexico.
Now, it is not a problem to have forests. When they are managed well, they are an incredible, essential, and an irreplaceable asset. However, our forests are growing faster and faster, building up huge amounts of potential energy which, without any doubt whatsoever, will burn as things are currently situated.
Fires are perhaps started by an arsonist, a lightning bolt, or the negligence of a camper. When this happens, the overgrown and dry forests will burn like paper. If there is even a moderate wind, these fires spread just like wildfire because they are burning up and destroying land, animals, structures, homes, and even people.
Just this year in Oregon, in my home State, almost 2 million acres burned. A huge amount of these 2 million acres was forestland. The Forest Service says that about 250 million of our tax dollars were spent fighting these fires. At least 32 homes were destroyed. That is in addition to hundreds of homes that have been lost in previous fires.
The value of timber burned up on private ground, 330,000 acres, caught up in this year's fires, just in Oregon, is in the tens of millions of dollars.
Because of forest fire risk, the cost of fire insurance on thousands of homes across Oregon is skyrocketing and in some cases is not even available.
The amount of CO
The same thing on an even greater and more damaging scale happened in California this year, Washington, Montana, and so on.
The causes of overgrown and dry forests burning up are many, but one of the obvious things we should be doing, and something that all rational people agree upon, is to reduce the amount of fuel in our forests, to actually go in and remove woody material from these 85 million acres that are not essential to the forest.
So why isn't this happening?
Why are we dragging our feet when it comes to getting brush and understory of small trees out of our forests?
Why are we failing to clean up our forests and protecting them?
Of course, the reason is our laws and the haystack of regulations that get in the way. They create delays, they create roadblocks, they create litigation paralysis, and they create endless bureaucratic efforts to write the perfect management plan. It is this set of problems and obstacles that the Fix Our Forests Act, brought to us today by Chair Westerman, would help significantly resolve.
The summary of the Fix Our Forests Act calls out the fact that we would be simplifying the approach to this, and that would be an excellent idea, revitalizing our rural economies, and renewing and prioritizing our science. All of these are excellent things.
I just want to say that when I was young, living on a ranch in eastern Oregon on the border of the Malheur National Forest, a fire in our forest was rare. In fact, in the 15 years I lived in that beautiful place, I remember only one forest fire in that forest. Now horrific fires are an annual and all too predictable occurrence. These are not small fires. These are terrible, destructive, and awful fires.
Just this summer, I received a call from a terrified constituent begging me to call airplanes with fire retardant to save their home. It is a miracle that only one person, and that was bad enough, was killed this year in fighting these fires. Next year we may be not so lucky.
Let's pass this bill so we can get into the forests now, not years from now, reduce fuel loads and make our communities and our people safer and our forests more resilient.
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