Political Quotes

“Mr. Chairman, I rise in support of this amendment. As the gentleman explained, this amendment does direct the Secretary of Agriculture to study the use of unmanned vehicles, or drones, in the responsible forest management wildland firefighting and fire suppression. Unmanned aerial vehicles are an emerging technology that should be harnessed to benefit our Nation's forests. As a matter of fact, these unmanned vehicles are being used extensively by the private sector to look at their forests, to manage them, to equip them with remote- sensing equipment so that they can cover large areas at a large time and gather much more accurate data than you could actually do on the ground. By ensuring that our land management practices utilize the cutting edge of available technology, we can ensure the prolonged health of our managed forests, and we can actually use this as a tool to cut down on the number of forest fires, and a better way to respond to those fires. I hope the gentleman will support the full bill after we add this amendment to it so that he can actually see the implementation of his amendment in practice. Mr. Chairman, again, I support this amendment, and I reserve the balance of my time.”