John Scott Duarte: “I thank Chairman Westerman for yielding, and I rise in support of the Fix Our Forests Act. As someone who farms on the…”

“I thank Chairman Westerman for yielding, and I rise in support of the Fix Our Forests Act. As someone who farms on the edge of the forest in California, I can tell you, bad policies coming out of Washington and Sacramento, exacerbated by frivolous litigation, have led to failed outcomes in Federal forest management. There is no doubt about it: This is abandonment of one of our natural resources. As we see with government-imposed droughts in California, laws and regulations are being twisted to block forest management and timber harvesting in our national forests, which peaked in the 1980s, but steadily declined and have not recovered. This has been exacerbated by the designation of over 111 million acres of preservation wilderness areas that severely limit access, ban timber harvests, and make even firefighting difficult in our forests. This resource abandonment is also hurting our communities. Countless jobs are lost, and insurance companies are seeking to cancel policies and refusing to even provide fire insurance coverage in areas of California because of the risk of out-of-control forest fires. These fires also devalue our national forest habitat and watersheds. For example, we are now learning that some of these fires burn so hot that they may be changing the soil chemistry to create cancer-causing hexavalent chromium. That is the Erin Brockovich compound.…”