During a House Natural Resources Committee hearing prior to the congressional recess, Rep. Jared Huffman (D-CA), Rep. Bruce Westerman (R-AR), and Rep. Tom McClintock (R-CA) spoke about prescribed burns.
00:00I recognize Ranking Member Huffman for the purpose of offering an amendment
00:03designated Huffman number three. Without objection, the amendment is considered red.
00:07Thank you, Mr. Chairman. We're going to keep trying to find some things that we
00:11ought to be able to agree on. We do have a fire problem in this country, but it's
00:15not the one we sometimes talk about. It is not too much fire. It's not enough of
00:22the right kind of fire, and that may sound counterintuitive, but take a look
00:27at the chart behind me. There it is. Historically, much more land has burned
00:32every year than it does now. And for centuries, fire played a stabilizing role
00:38in our landscape. It cleared brush. It recycled nutrients. It made room for
00:43healthy new growth. And then around the early 1900s, everything changed. We began
00:47aggressively suppressing every fire, no matter the context. The result was a
00:52steep drop in annual burned area, and the beginning of a dangerous buildup of
00:58hazardous fuel. And now we're paying the price. That same chart shows that fire
01:03today is no longer stabilizing. It's destabilizing. We're seeing fewer fires
01:07overall, but when they happen, they are far more destructive, fast-moving, and deadly.
01:13And that's the legacy of a century of fire suppression. We created a fire deficit and
01:20it's growing. And that's why my amendment would create a new prescribed fire account
01:25that authorizes $150 million every year for safe, controlled prescribed fires to
01:31reduce that hazardous fuel buildup that will just be kindling for the next mega
01:38fire if we don't do something to manage it. Increasing tools and resources for
01:42prescribed fire should be a bipartisan priority that everyone in this room
01:48supports. And of course, doing it safely with appropriate sideboards to make
01:52sure that it's done right. I urge my colleagues to support this amendment and
01:57yield back. The gentleman yields back. Is there further discussion on the amendment?
02:03I recognize myself. Mr. Huffman, I locked your graphic up there because I think it does tell a story and it shows how
02:11fire suppression has actually increased the intensity of fires that we have today, but
02:22there's another caveat to that. You have to not only, if you're going to do controlled
02:28burning, you need to thin. But when you put the fires out, you just allow everything to
02:33continue to grow without any removal of the underbrush and the ladder fuels. You're
02:41eventually going to get a fire that you can't put out and that's what we're seeing
02:45all across the country. So we do need to change the way we manage. We need to do
02:53thinning and burning if we're going to do burning. And I think we agree that we
03:00desperately need to increase active management on our nation's forest. And
03:04again, the controlled burn is management. Even when we decide not to do anything on
03:11the forest, that's management because the forests are constantly changing. And we
03:15can sit here in this committee room or any other committee room or in any agency
03:21office and say, you know, we're just going to let the forest be the forest and
03:25we're not going to have any intervention and the forest is going to continue to
03:29grow. And it's not going to listen to us. If we say forest, you have to be more fire
03:35resilient. Don't burn. Don't cost us a lot of money and damage property and and take
03:41lives. It's just quite simply not going to listen to us. We have to be active and we
03:46have to be proactive if we really want to address this issue. And just putting more
03:53money out there, unless we get action on the ground, that's not going to fix the
03:59issue as well. A lot of fires start by lightning and there's not anything we can
04:09really do to stop that. The only thing we can do is make sure the forest is at its
04:16optimum health and resiliency so that when fires start, whether they're from
04:20lightning or wild fires or human-made fires, that the forest is able to withstand it, regardless of the
04:29of what the the weather and the climate conditions are, where that forest grows, we
04:34know how to do proper management to keep the forest healthy and and resilient. You
04:43know, it comes back to to management. It comes back to using common sense. That's what Mr. McClintock's bill does.
04:55And again, oppose this amendment, urge my colleagues to oppose it, and I yield back.
05:02Is there further discussion on the amendment?
05:05Mr. Chairman. Mr. McClintock, you recognize.
05:07Well, I'd like to offer the ranking member some additional data here, if we could bring up this chart.
05:13The bars you see here are a board feed of timber that has been harvested off of the federal lands, the beginning in 1984, as you can see a marked decline throughout the 80s and 90s as the environmental laws that he has championed have reduced
05:41our ability to manage our forests. The line you see here is acreage destroyed by catastrophic
05:48fire. We've seen an 80 percent reduction in timber harvested off of the federal lands and a concomitant
05:55increase in acreage destroyed by fire. Fire is how nature removes excess timber. Nature doesn't
06:03care that it takes hundreds of years for forest to regrow. Nature has all the time in the world.
06:08Now we mortals do care. That's why we created the land agencies to do the gardening ourselves.
06:15We sent foresters every year out into the forest to mark off excess timber, and then we auctioned
06:21it off to logging companies that paid us to remove it. That produced a steady stream of revenues into the federal treasury, with which we then were able to better manage our forests.
06:31We had healthy forests, we had thriving mountain economies, and we dramatically reduced the scourge of forest fires from up to 12 million acres a year to just a quarter million in California, and we held that steady throughout the 20th century.
06:45That was what fire suppression plus logging did to protect the forests. The problem is that we passed environmental laws in the 70s that made logging all but impossible. So we stopped carrying out the excess timber, and nature has now returned to burn it out.
07:02So I have to push back very hard on this fire is our friend nonsense. It is not that we put forest fires out, it's that we stopped carrying out the excess timber before it could choke off the forest and burn.
07:16That excess timber will always come out of a forest. The only question is whether we carry it out or allow nature to burn it out. The destruction we see today is only unprecedented in the last century.
07:31Without land management, catastrophic fire was the normal, and we're seeing that condition return because we have abandoned our forests.
07:39I yield back.
07:41I yield back.
07:42Gentleman yields back.
07:43I ask unanimous consent to submit to the record another article by ProPublica, and it says,
07:51as millions of acres burn, firefighters say the US Forest Service has left them with critical shortages.
07:57The only issue here is this is from August 15, 2024, so it seems like ProPublica is just like wash, rinsing, and repeating.
08:06And they're not, this author is not satisfied, whether it's the Biden administration or the Trump administration, so I'd say they're just equally upset.
08:18Almost sounds like the same wording says, firefighters on the ground say that the agency is understating how badly depleted their ranks are.
08:26So without objection, I ask unanimous consent, so ordered.
08:35Is there further discussion on the amendment?
08:38There's no further discussion on the amendment.
08:40The question is on the amendment offered by Ranking Member Huffman, designated Huffman number three.
08:44All those in favor signify by saying aye.
08:47Those opposed, no.
08:48No.
08:49The opinion of the chair, the no's have it.
08:54And the amendment is not agreed to.
08:56So I'm very excited.
08:57I'm just going to ask that, too.
08:59I think that there is a good point out there.
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