Jeff Flake: “as I stand here today, my home State of Arizona is burning. We have lost now nearly 400,000 acres to fire. That is more…”

“as I stand here today, my home State of Arizona is burning. We have lost now nearly 400,000 acres to fire. That is more than 500 square miles. Colorado is burning as well. We have lost a tremendous amount of forest just this year, and we have got to do something about it. We should not be surprised at the losses so far to fire. Our forests have been choked with underbrush and excess trees for years now; and whenever we try to go in and thin and manage our forests, we are blocked by radical environmentalists who file lawsuits, who create such uncertainty with the Forest Service that nobody can go in and thin our forests like they should. One of the groups that is blocking us from going into forests and thinning is a group called Forest Guardians, one of these radical environmental groups. They were interviewed in the East Valley Tribune in Arizona yesterday, and in the paper it says, Forest Guardians oppose using any forest thinning that might benefit commercial logging companies.”