Jeff Duncan: “the forest fires in Los Alamos and Nevada have highlighted what may have become a much bigger problem. One of the…”

“the forest fires in Los Alamos and Nevada have highlighted what may have become a much bigger problem. One of the subcommittees on which I serve is the Subcommittee on Forest and Forest Health of the Committee on Resources. We heard testimony a few months ago that almost 40 million acres of Federal land out West was in imminent danger of catastrophic forest fires. This is because environmental extremists fanatically, sometimes even violently, oppose cutting any trees in our national forests. Forestry experts tell us that we have to cut some trees to have healthy forests, yet some of these extremists oppose even the removal of dead and dying trees, thus causing huge fuel buildups on the floors of these forests, leading to forest fires. The Los Alamos fire was a so-called controlled burn set by Federal bureaucrats that simply got out of control. Of course, we all know that no Federal bureaucrat has ever made a mistake, or at least one that they have been held accountable for. The leading environmental extremist, Secretary Babbitt, said on television last week that our forests are now 100 times more dangerous than they were 100 years ago, but it is because of the very policies that he has been advocating. If we do not start cutting more trees in the national forests soon, then in the very near future we are going to see forest fires that make the Los Alamos disaster look like peanuts in comparison.”