Joe Cunningham: “Mr. Chairman, I love to hunt. I have hunted in Oregon, I have hunted in Washington State, I have trout fished up there…”

“Mr. Chairman, I love to hunt. I have hunted in Oregon, I have hunted in Washington State, I have trout fished up there, gotten some beautiful fish, and I want to protect those streams and forests. But let me tell where I think things have gone astray. In our district in San Diego we lost 3,000 homes this last fire season and 22 firefighters were killed. I look back, and the gentleman says that we want the money to clear the forests. Well, 12 years ago, many of us fought to have the bark beetles cleaned up. I was up in the area of the gentleman from Washington (Mr. Dicks). I was in Oregon and Washington and Northern California, because I was hunting deer. The beetles had eaten a lot of the wood and created a hazard, and they were going to destroy the forests. We wanted to cut those, because the bark beetles were not there where the dead wood is. They were in just a little bit further, and that is what we wanted to cut; but many of the folks, the environmental groups, said, no, you cannot do that; you want to log indiscriminately No, we did not. We wanted to stop the bark beetles, a reasonable conservative approach; but we were stopped doing that. Pine Valley, the whole town burnt down. You know how many homes and lives we lost up there because the bark beetles had cut through most all of the timber?”