Angie Craig: “I rise this morning--and I will return tomorrow and the next day--to talk about a story and a saga playing its way…”

“I rise this morning--and I will return tomorrow and the next day--to talk about a story and a saga playing its way across the western landscape that you and I watched yesterday and on the morning news. We saw the headlines in all of the papers that said, Monstrous Wildfires Near Arizona Town; Show Low, Arizona, and The Thousands of Citizens Who Live There at Risk. What I want to do for a brief period is stage this as the great John Wayne movie ``Rio Bravo,'' where John Wayne captures the outlaw Joe Bernadette and sticks him in jail waiting for the judge to get the town to try the outlaw. It is the saga of the white hats and the black hats. For two decades we have been playing the white hat and the black hat game when it comes to the management of our western public lands and especially the timber lands of the West. In the early 1990s, scientists came together and said: ``If we don't begin a concerted effort of active management and fuel reduction on the floor of western great basin forests, they will burn in wildfire.'' That is an exact quote, well over a decade ago, when the experts saw that the lack of management and the shutdown of our public lands would some day spur us into wildfires.”