Political Quotes

“today, I am honoring a commitment and submitting for public review a proposal to protect old-growth forests and to aggressively move to restore, through thinning, the millions of acres of at-risk forests across the State of Oregon. The novelist Ellen Glasgow once remarked: The only difference between a rut and a grave is their dimensions. We find ourselves today in a decades-old rut that threatens our forests and our lives like never before. It is time for change for Oregon forests, and that change can only begin with new ideas--ideas that depart radically from recent decades of forest mismanagement, old-growth destruction, catastrophic fire, and political gamesmanship. We must break this cycle of endless fighting, of old, unwinnable battles in the woods that now endanger our forests and communities alike. We must make the preparations now to move forward, under new national leadership in 2009, to restore our treasured and endangered forests with sustainable, ecologically beneficial restoration thinning while permanently protecting the few remaining old-growth forests we have left. We ought to be creating new and sustainable jobs in forestry for now and for the future and finally achieve the economic and ecological promise of the Northwest Forest Plan.”