00:00Thank you very much. And I will yield the balance of my time, Mr. Chair.
00:07You want to yield that time to me?
00:14I will yield the balance of my time to you, Mr. Chair.
00:17I will yield the gentleman from Wyoming, Ms. Hagerman.
00:20Well, thank you. And I very much appreciate you having this hearing. I think it's incredibly important.
00:26And Mr. Chief Muncie, what you said at the beginning is so critical if we're actually going to have accountability
00:32and have the ability to properly manage and protect these resources.
00:36There are an awful lot of lies out there, and I'm going to have an opportunity to ask some additional questions.
00:41But there's a few things that I think everybody in this room ought to understand.
00:45In 2001, on January 12th, Bill Clinton, on his way out of office, adopted the roadless rule.
00:51Denied access management and use to 58.5 million acres of National Forest Service lands.
00:57And that is the reason why we're here today and why we have the crisis on our hands
01:01related to management of our national forests and the catastrophic forest fires and beetle outbreak
01:07that we have seen over the last 25 years.
01:10I'll just give you one example.
01:12In 1997, there was a blowdown in Route National Forest, knocked down 13,000 acres of trees in one night.
01:19Because the Forest Service, because that was a roadless area and partially a wilderness area,
01:24the Forest Service would not allow anyone to go in there and treat.
01:27All you need to do is look at landsats.
01:29All you need to do is look at aerial photography, color infrareds,
01:33and you can watch as that pine beetle outbreak emanated outward from there.
01:38That's not because of global warming.
01:40That's not because of climate change.
01:42That is because of bad forest management and the roadless rule.
01:47That's the reason why our forests have been devastated because of the roadless rule and bad policies coming out of Washington, D.C.
01:56And if you're unwilling to recognize that, we're never going to be able to fix our forests.
02:00We're never going to be able to protect these resources.
02:03So you're absolutely right.
02:05Until we're honest about what has happened in our national forests, we're not going to protect this resource.
02:10With that, I yield back.
02:12I thank the gentleman.
02:13The gentleman from Arizona.
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