Political Quotes

“I am going to wrap this up simply by saying a program like this has generated a tremendous amount of community involvement. There are advisory committees that bring the industry and environmental folks together. That is what we are going to need to get this job done right. It is called collaborative forestry. The Secure Rural Schools program is something that Senator Merkley and I want to reauthorize. It is a textbook case for what you want to do for collaborative forestry. We didn't even really get into forest health because we all know our forests, particularly in the West, are burning up, so Senator Risch, Senator Crapo, and I went into something called fire borrowing, which is an extraordinarily inefficient policy that discourages prevention with respect to fire. We are going to be back to talk about the nuts and bolts of sensible forest policy. We need to build on this collaborative effort, as we have sought to do in our O&C bill--the bill that Senator Merkley and I have been involved with--which will double the harvest, on average, for the next 50 years, according to the experts. We want it to be understood that we are going to be fighting on a number of fronts. We will fight with respect to the trade policy, which is long overdue, as it relates to getting a fair shake for our softwood lumber producers and value-added forestry. We are going to focus on collaborative approaches and get the harvest up in a sustainable way.…”