Fix Our Forests Act
Rep. Tom McClintock (CA-05) Washington, D.C. notes, “Comprehensive, bipartisan legislation to restore forest health and increase resiliency to catastrophic wildfires has passed the House floor. The legislation, H.R. 471, will provide agencies with critical tools to implement vital forest management projects immediately.”
Rep. Tom McClintock (CA-05) is a co-sponsor of the legislation. Provisions in the measure include his previously introduced legislation the Proven Forest Management Act. The Proven Forest Management Act expands reforms that were secured for the Tahoe Basin in the 2016 WINN Act in the Tahoe Basin.
The legislation will next go to the Senate.
Remarks in Support by Rep. Tom McClintock January 23, 2025:
Over the last ten years, we have lost fully one quarter of our federal forests to catastrophic fire.
An untended forest is no different than an untended garden. It will grow and grow until it chokes itself to death, and then succumb to disease, pestilence, drought, and ultimately catastrophic fire. This is how nature gardens. She doesn’t care that it takes a century to re-grow. We mortals do.
Excess timber will come out of the forest in only two ways. Either we will carry it out, or nature will burn it out. That’s why we created the Forest Service – to do our own gardening and remove excess timber before it can choke off the forest. Every year, foresters would mark off surplus timber and we would auction it off to logging companies who paid us to remove it. For a century, we enjoyed healthy, fire resistant and resilient forests.
But then we passed bureaucratic laws that have made the active management of our forests all but impossible. A simple forest management plan now takes an AVERAGE of 5.3 years to complete and costs millions of dollars – more than the value of the timber to be harvested. Since these laws were passed, timber harvested from the federal lands has fallen 75 percent with a concomitant increase in acreage destroyed by fire.
We were able to get a categorical exclusion from NEPA for forest thinning projects in the Tahoe Basin in 2016. In the nine years since its enactment, it has reduced the approval process for forest thinning projects from five years to less than four months. It has reduced the environmental reports from more than 800 pages down to a few dozen. Timber harvested has increased from roughly a million board feet a year to nine million. The treated acreage has tripled. And the Tahoe forests are returning to fire resiliency. This saved the City of South Lake Tahoe from the Caldor Fire three years ago. The town of Grizzly Flats – which wasn’t protected by this law – was wiped out by the same fire.
I have been trying for years to expand these proven reforms to the rest of the national forest system through the Proven Forest Management Act. That measure is included in this legislation, and its enactment is long overdue.
This should not be a partisan issue. The choice is between policies that have proven to work and policies that have proven to fail. Let us return to the policies that work before we run out of forests to burn.
