John Hansen: “I asked this vice president the question, why is it that you resist managing the public ground? Why is it that you…”

“I asked this vice president the question, why is it that you resist managing the public ground? Why is it that you resist the idea that we can go in and do some cleaning, thinning, prescribe fires and take care of it and keep a wholesome forest, like many of the private organizations have? We now have, as the gentleman from Idaho said, fuel load. What is that? It is dead trees, it is dead fall, it is brush. So now you have the potential of this summer, as last summer, is a careless smoker, a fire caused by a campfire that is left unattended, or a lightning strike, which is one of the bigger ones, and here we go again, we are going to burn the forest. This person from this organization answered me and said, because it is not nature's way. Nature's way is just let it do its thing. I do not know if I bought into that. You get down to the idea of 1905 we started the Forest Service, and if you read the charter of the Forest Service, it is to maintain and take care of the forests of America. And that means cleaning it, thinning it, fighting fires, instead of getting ourselves in what we had in the year 2000, the heaviest fire year in record.”