Bruce Westerman: “I would like to thank the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Gosar) for his leadership in setting up this Special Order on the…”

“I would like to thank the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Gosar) for his leadership in setting up this Special Order on the importance of proper forest management, proper forest management on our Nation's Federal lands. I would also like to thank him for his unwavering support of my bill, H.R. 2936, the Resilient Federal Forests Act of 2017. It is my sincere hope that we see H.R. 2936 move off the floor of the House with strong bipartisan support and then move through the Senate and get it on the President's desk so he can sign this and we can start the process of reversing something that has been going on for many years. As a person educated in forestry, I can tell you that forests grow slowly. We almost don't recognize the change in the forest because it happens so slowly over time. But given enough years, we see what has happened to our timberland out West. I have a map here of all the forest fires that we have seen out West this summer. We didn't just get to this point overnight. It happened over a series of years. It happened when, back in the 1990s, I believe, we had an overreaction to probably some forest management practices that weren't the best that they could be. The pendulum swung way too far, and we got in a position where, what I say is, we were loving our trees to death, and we stopped managing our trees. But we kept putting fires out, and fire is nature's natural way to manage overgrown forests.…”