John Ensign: “I will make a few comments about the underlying legislation, the Healthy Forest initiative, and give a perspective from…”

“I will make a few comments about the underlying legislation, the Healthy Forest initiative, and give a perspective from another western state, the State of Nevada, my home State, and some personal experiences I have had in the last few years. I saw a wonderful program on the Discovery channel about the history of forest fires in the United States. They went back a few hundred years and talked about the natural burning of the forests and how forest fires occurred. We had fairly catastrophic fires in the early 1900s that changed our attitude because a lot of people were killed in those fires. It changed the way we looked at forest fires. We decided to try to put forest fires out using various methods of fire suppression. Over the last 100 or so years, in trying to put out all these forest fires, we have stopped the natural clearing of the underbrush. As humans have moved more into the forests with our development, even if we wanted to go back to allowing natural burns to occur, we could not do that because of the devastation that can occur such as we are seeing in California with people living so close to the natural environment. There are some things we can do to manage our forests so when the fires do occur they happen in a more natural fashion. What we have been seeing in the last several years is they are not natural fires. They are catastrophic fires and they burn the entire forest. They literally sterilize the ground.”