On the recordOctober 30, 2019
As much as I appreciate my colleagues' desire to do something good, I must rise in opposition today to H.R. 823. As we all know, wilderness designations in theory implement natural management, meaning that man is to have a hands-off approach on the management of the forest. But this is a farce, because when catastrophic wildfires ignite, as they will under natural management, we often rush to put the fires out, which is just as much human management as thinning or other more recognized forestry management processes. We need wilderness areas in our country, and we need to manage them as such if we want to be intellectually honest in claiming them as wilderness areas. This works in areas like Yellowstone National Park where the predominant species is lodgepole pine that naturally burns to the ground approximately every century, like we saw when one-third of the park burned in the 1980s. The idea that we can preserve a forest is misguided. Forests are living organisms, and there is only one way to preserve a living organism: first you have to kill it. Take, for instance, a cucumber. If you want to make a pickle, the first thing you do to preserve a cucumber into a pickle is you boil it, you put it in vinegar, you put it in a jar, and you preserve it. If you want to preserve human tissue, you put the tissue in formaldehyde. There is a misnomer that we can preserve our forests because forests are living organisms. We should be discussing instead conservation.…
