Richard Pombo: “Mr. Speaker, we do have a problem. And I think that everybody who has come to the floor today to talk about the…”

“Mr. Speaker, we do have a problem. And I think that everybody who has come to the floor today to talk about the underlying bill has recognized that we have a serious problem. The gentleman from Oregon (Mr. DeFazio) talked about 100 years of mismanagement in our forests, and I think it is the only thing that he said that I really did agree with him on, because there has been a hundred years of mismanagement in our forests. We went from what I believe was a point of cutting too many trees, and we had the clear cuts and all of the resulting environmental degradation and the problems that resulted out of that. And as a response to that, we had a number of environmental groups and people that came to this floor over the years that said we cannot continue to treat and manage our forests this way. And the pendulum swung all the way in the other direction. And a lot of folks that over the years have worked on the issue really did believe they were doing the right thing, but they were not. The problem is they adopted a policy of hands off, keep man out, we do not want to impact the natural state of our forest. But what they forgot was we are part of nature and we are part of the impact on our forests.”