James Hill: “I want to join with others in commending the gentleman from Oregon (Mr. Smith), the chairman of the Committee on…”

“I want to join with others in commending the gentleman from Oregon (Mr. Smith), the chairman of the Committee on Agriculture, and the ranking member for bringing forward this bipartisan and common-sense proposal. Mr. Chairman, we need healthy forests, and all the experts agree that the public forests in the United States are in a serious and unhealthy condition. Unhealthy forests create significant fire hazards, and in the post-El Nino period that we are about to experience in the West, those are dry conditions, and we have unprecedented buildup of fields in these forests, and the fire hazards are extraordinary. I want to point out to my colleagues that the fire hazards today in the West are significantly higher than they were 10 years ago while Americans watched as Yellowstone Park burned up. Catastrophic fires, Mr. Chairman, scar the landscape, they erode critical topsoils, they destroy wildlife and their habitat, and they destroy critical spawning areas. We cannot save the forests by burning them down; we save them by managing them, and that is what the goal of this legislation is. Mr. Chairman, I have heard in this debate that this group or that group is going to score our votes. Mr. Chairman, it does not matter to me how those groups in Washington score my vote today, it is how the people in the Northwest and the people in western Montana score my vote. It is their communities that are at risk of destruction.”