Restoring Healthy Forests for Healthy Communities Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. PEARCE. Mr. Chairman, I appreciate the opportunity to speak on this bipartisan bill that brings commonsense management back to our forests.

Since Tom Tidwell took over the Forest Service, he said that he would like to reintroduce fire into the wild. Well, he's done that. This year, almost 10 million acres, more than twice the size of New Jersey. In the years since 2009 when he took over, larger than Ohio, 27 million acres have burned in our national forests.

Instead, this bill creates jobs--jobs in places like Cibola County in New Mexico where Matt Allen used to have a thriving mill but now survives on cutting one-by-four timber, one-by-four boards out of the logs he is able to take out of the forest.

Our streams are choked with mud. Habitat is devastated. A 75-foot deep lake near Ruidoso, New Mexico, that provides drinking water to the city of Alamogordo has 50 feet of fill in that 70-foot lake. Our fish are dead. Our streams are dead, choked with mud because the head of the U.S. Forest Service says, Let it burn instead of cut it. Common sense says cut it. This bill ensures that.

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