Political Quotes

“today, the issue deals strictly with the management of our national forests and the health of those national forests. The amendment before us would eliminate the one tool we now have. I think, as an Idahoan, I speak with some experience as to what this is all about, because 2 years ago we had devastating forest fires that devastated 589,000 acres of land. That is 919 square miles. That is a number. How big is that? That is approximately three-quarters of the entire land in the State of Rhode Island. This is a huge amount of land. Yet the proposal is that we would only go in and salvage approximately 10 percent of the dead timber that is in that tremendous, huge area. This amendment would leave that dead and dying timber to simply rot, to rot. We want to go in and salvage 10 percent of that. Also, this timber that is not removed simply adds additional fuel to future devastating fires. All the fire scientists tell us that is what we can expect now, more and more of these devastating fires of hundreds of thousands of acres at a time.”