Angie Craig: “I chair the Subcommittee on Forestry and Public Lands. For the last decade we have known as a country that our forests…”

“I chair the Subcommittee on Forestry and Public Lands. For the last decade we have known as a country that our forests are rapidly growing unhealthy, largely because we have not managed them as skillfully as we should. In areas that are natural and left to be natural, we understand not touching them. But where we have forests in what we call urban interface today, where houses are built amongst the trees, there ought to be an aggressive effort to keep fuel loading down and to disperse trees in such a way as to disallow these kinds of crises from developing. It is happening now in New Mexico because of a major error on the part of a Federal agency. We literally have millions and millions of acres of forested public lands around this country in an unsatisfactory condition, as in the mountains of the great State of New Mexico, and one spark, one lightning strike, or one human match could cost millions of dollars, lose thousands of homes, and the land that it touches, it destroys for a generation.”