Teacher Victims' Family Assistance Act of 2017

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all members may have 5 legislative days in which to revise and extend their remarks and to include extraneous material on the topic of my Special Order.

Mr. Speaker, I rise to bring this Chamber's attention to the devastating wildfires that have ravaged the Nation this year.

The National Interagency Fire Center reports that there have been 49,563 fires that have burned 8,422,251 acres so far in 2017. Wow. Another 80 million throughout the country are at high-risk status, including one-quarter of the 193 million-acre National Forest System.

Though the Forest Service has spent a record $2.3 billion to fight fires in 2017, these resources are being spent on the back end.

Mr. Speaker, the country has literally been on fire, particularly Western communities. It is far past time that this Chamber pass H.R. 2936 and get serious about combating catastrophic wildfires before they get started.

Mr. Westerman's bipartisan bill adopts a forward-thinking, active management strategy and also provides allocation reforms that would cease the practice of fire borrowing.

I will likely have more comments later, but we have a few folks pressed for time, so I am going to end my comments there.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Tipton), my friend.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the vice chairman for his comments.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Utah (Mr. Stewart).

Mr. Speaker, I thank my friend from Utah, who has seen the challenging aspects and destruction from the fires, for his remarks.

I also now want to acknowledge my friend from Montana, who is actually still seeing the ravaging of the fires. In fact, Seeley Lake, Montana, set a record for the worst air quality ever recorded there, 18 times greater than the EPA safe particulate limit. Wow, that is a record that we have got to stop.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Montana (Mr. Gianforte).

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Montana, who I am sorry to see have such a hard time this year in forest management, for his remarks.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from California (Mr. McClintock), my friend and colleague.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from California for his thoughts. He brought up some specific facts that need reiteration just because they are so plentiful.

The Forest Service only harvested 2.5 billion board feet in 2016, compared to over 10 billion board feet in 1990. To make matters worse, litigation and other challenges have caused a significant reduction in active sawmills nationwide from over 1,300 in 1995, to just over 220 today.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Oregon (Mr. Walden).

Mr. Speaker, I thank the chairman so greatly for his indulgence in coming down and expressing the problems that have been faced in Oregon and thank him for the timely hearing tomorrow in Energy and Commerce. We certainly appreciate it.

We need to enlighten all Americans as to the tragedy that is going on in our public Western lands.

I yield to the gentleman.

I want to highlight one thing that the gentleman actually brought to attention. Catastrophic fires also cause significant damage to the environment. Robust data from NASA has concluded that one catastrophic wildfire can emit more carbon emissions in a few days than total vehicle emissions in an entire State over the course of the year. Phenomenal. We just have to make sure people understand.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for his comments.

Mr. Speaker, I now yield to the gentleman from Washington (Mr. Newhouse), my dear friend.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Washington.

Mr. Speaker, the two speakers have now brought up the issue that the House has repeatedly passed resolutions and ideas in regards to funding and taking care and mitigating our forest tragedy. There is an old adage around here that the Democrats may be the opposition, but the Senate is always the enemy. What we are here to do is light a fire under the Senate. Their talk is cheap; their actions speak. So let's light a fire.

To do that, I now yield to the gentleman whose Resilient Federal Forests Act is the topic for this evening, H.R. 2936.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Arkansas (Mr. Westerman.)

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Arkansas for his excellent leadership. He is very modest.

Listen, folks, I made a comment. Around here in Washington, D.C., we talk about the Democrats being the opposition and the Senate being the problem. Well, as you know, this is a very bipartisan bill. He is very modest.

Let's go back through what H.R. 2936, the Resilient Federal Forests Act, actually does.

It allows for the streamlined review of projects up to 30,000 acres if the management strategy is put forward by collaborative stakeholders. Imagine that, something so simple.

It also requires litigants opposing active management projects to propose an alternative proposal as opposed to just saying ``no.'' ``No'' isn't a solution. It is what you are for.

It removes incentives for extreme special interest groups to file frivolous lawsuits--boy, once again, coming to the table with a solution.

It empowers local stakeholders and decisionmakers. So often we overlook the people on the ground, on Main Street, who have to live with the consequences for bad policy decisions.

It also empowers Tribal communities to be part of the solution and to help reduce the risk of wildfire. We see this time and again, that the Native Tribes that are in charge of their forests have pristine management practices.

H.R. 2936 also maintains current protections for our environmentally sensitive areas, including wilderness and roadless areas. What a concession.

We need to be clear about larger risk areas and get to these in a more timely manner that we really want to handle.

This bill is good for forest-dependent species as it allows for improvements to their habitat.

This bill adopts a forward-thinking, active management strategy that combats dangerous wildfires before they get started, which includes reforms that would end the practice of fire borrowing.

I want to thank the gentleman for his excellent piece of legislation. It is time that it moves forward.

Once again, it is not the House that is the problem, but our colleagues across the street. Once again, talk is cheap; actions speak. Americans need help.

The fact that these disasters are quite natural might lead one to think they are inevitable, but according to forestry officials and experts, it is our stunted Federal forestry management and underfunded and misallocated Forest Service accounts that are to blame.

Our system is broken. These fires start naturally and decimate our natural ecosystems, but the ultimate cause at the level of their severity and recurrence is manmade.

The facts about the relationship between management and wildfires speak for themselves. Forest Service data indicates that active forest management reduces wildfire intensity, while improving forest health. In spite of this, only 1 to 2 percent of high risk areas are actively treated and subject to forest management.

The United States Forest Service expends too many resources fighting fires after they break out to work to prevent them in any significant way before they start. By performing routine thinning, culling hazardous fuels on the forest floors, and conducting controlled burns, they could accomplish exactly that, but such a course of action would require ample resources and wise allocation. As you could guess, my professional diagnosis is that both of those are in short supply.

I hope my friends on the other side of the aisle are able to hear what I say next. If you care about carbon emissions, you should care deeply about this issue, no matter where you live in the country, no matter where you live.

NASA data shows that one wildfire can emit more carbon in a few days than total vehicle emissions in a State for the whole year. To put it in perspective, controlled burning releases roughly 10 percent as much, and is only one part of an overall active management strategy.

So the correct choice in this situation is obvious: we spend a little more on the front end so that we can save ourselves much of the economic, environmental, and familial displacement costs on the back end. These costs are year after year, and they are catastrophic when they are left untreated.

Treatment is the right course of action, but it requires a little bit of planning, due diligence, and yes, action on our part. I know Congress is a big fan of the word, but when you look at the track record, Congress isn't a big fan of actually acting.

In response to this dire situation, Members of Congress from across the country will be sharing their thoughts and experiences within their home States. They will be discussing this during the year, and this past year of terrible wildfires. These are stories that need to be recounted.

They will also be speaking about the solutions that we have come together

with, for forestry officials and stakeholders across the country. Tackling this problem has become a collaborative and holistic national policy effort, and the policy proposals we have produced are reflective of this fact. They are also bipartisan.

But, Mr. Speaker, we can't let this just be a rhetorical exercise. We are united in demanding Congress do something. This Chamber has the knowledge and aptitude to deliver policy solutions. Now we need the political will to turn that knowledge into congressional action. Only then will huge portions of the country finally see some relief from these disasters.

When your home is on fire, it is straightforward, it is a nonpartisan issue. You call the fire department, and after the problem is dealt with, you make sure that you eliminate what caused the fire so that you don't see it again.

Mr. Speaker, our Nation was on fire this year, and I demand that we, as this Chamber, unite in the same spirit of decisive problem solving as we do for our natural disasters. Let's put these fires out, and then let's stop the brunt for next year's fires before they start.

In my four terms as a Congressman from Arizona, I have had to witness the largest catastrophic fire in Arizona history, and also the most catastrophic life-taking, the Yarnell fire. The first was the Wild Well fire in northeast Arizona, and the second was the Yarnell fire that is now in the movie theaters that took the lives of 19 firefighters. That is a travesty.

This is something that gives when it is managed right. The people back home know the right answer. Let's give them the tools, the working power, and the policy that allows them, instead of being victims, to be stalwart solutions for a policy that gives back.

As the gentleman from Arkansas said, as Teddy Roosevelt said: Leave our natural resources better than we found them.

Mr. Speaker, the speakers tonight shared their stories. We want America to hear those loud and clear. These are natural disasters no different than hurricanes, but these, in one case, are different. They are manmade.

Let's bring this commonsense policy that Mr. Westerman has put forward. He is a true advocate and smart in regards to those reforms; that is why we want to make sure that H.R. 2936 gets moved through this Chamber, and then put the onus back on the Senate, so that we actually reward the people for good policy and making sure that the victims are turned upside down and made stalwart solution makers.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Gosar) for his leadership in setting up this Special Order on the importance of proper forest management, proper forest management on our Nation's Federal lands. I would also like to thank him for his unwavering support of my bill, H.R. 2936, the Resilient Federal Forests Act of 2017.

It is my sincere hope that we see H.R. 2936 move off the floor of the House with strong bipartisan support and then move through the Senate and get it on the President's desk so he can sign this and we can start the process of reversing something that has been going on for many years.

As a person educated in forestry, I can tell you that forests grow slowly. We almost don't recognize the change in the forest because it happens so slowly over time. But given enough years, we see what has happened to our timberland out West. I have a map here of all the forest fires that we have seen out West this summer.

We didn't just get to this point overnight. It happened over a series of years. It happened when, back in the 1990s, I believe, we had an overreaction to probably some forest management practices that weren't the best that they could be. The pendulum swung way too far, and we got in a position where, what I say is, we were loving our trees to death, and we stopped managing our trees.

But we kept putting fires out, and fire is nature's natural way to manage overgrown forests. So what we have seen happen over time is we have seen more insects and disease infestations. As these trees grow closer together and fill the growing space, they start competing for water; they start competing for sunlight; they compete for nutrients; they become weak, and they become susceptible to insect attacks; they become susceptible to disease; and then they die. We get lightning strikes or we get fires to get out, and then we are dealing with a catastrophic event.

But it doesn't have to be this way. If we would employ sound forest management practices, we can do a lot to mitigate the intensity and the number of these fires.

As we look at issues that are created with these fires, we know that this has been the worst fire season on record, but it broke the record that was set in 2015 as the worst fire season on record. I predict that, if we don't start managing our forests now, in the next coming years we are going to see new worst fire seasons on record.

This is a process that will continue to get worse unless we address the problem. It is to the point where it is going to take time to reverse what has happened and to get the forest back into a healthy state.

I was notified this week about a sheep farmer down here in southeast Wyoming, in Torrington, who was a young guy getting into the business, and he lost five sheep. He took them to the veterinarian to do a postmortem analysis and found out they died from smoke inhalation.

Now, the fire that was creating the smoke that was drifting down there was about 800 miles away in Montana. If it is causing that kind of health risk to sheep, what is it doing to the residents that live out here? I know that there have been schools closed, there have been people who have to stay indoors, but this creates a health risk. It is more than just a risk to healthy forests. It is a risk to healthy humans.

We have got another map here, and this shows the smoke drift on a particular day. I believe this was September 14. This is a map that was produced by NOAA, and you can see where the fires were, and you can see how the winds carry the smoke. The red shows the most intense areas of smoke, the lighter green the intermediate, and then the darker green shows where the least smoke intensity was.

This map really illustrates how fires in certain areas, the smoke gets picked up by the wind and gets carried to different places across the country.

When I look at this map of the Western United States--and me being from Arkansas, some might ask: How do these fires affect forestry in Arkansas?

Well, we have talked about fire borrowing. When we take money from one account in the Forest Service budget and put it in the firefighting account, that takes money away from management practices that could take place on the forest in Arkansas and other places to the east where we don't have as many catastrophic fires. On top of that, we see how the smoke drift affects many, many parts of the country.

When we think about the smoke, what is that smoke? It is mainly carbon. One of the main purposes of a healthy forest is to fulfill the cycle of photosynthesis, where it pulls carton dioxide out of the atmosphere, takes that in through the leaves, converts it into sugars, and releases oxygen back into the air. The forests clean the air except when they are burning at the rate that they are burning right now, at 8.5 million acres of our Federal timberland that went up in smoke, putting hundreds of millions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere. If we want to talk about taking carbon out of the atmosphere, the solution to that is a healthy forest.

But not only do forests clean the atmosphere, they clean the water. The more ground cover we have, the more water gets filtered as it goes into the ground, as it goes into streams.

But overstocked forests can also prevent water from actually getting into the ground table and getting into streams. In areas in the West where we are having water shortage problems, proper management of forests can help to alleviate those problems.

We are not talking about clear-cutting. I get so tired of people saying, ``All they want to do is clear-cut our Federal forests.'' We don't want to clear-cut the Federal forests. We want to manage them. We want to use practices like thinning from below, where we take out small stock, where we take out the smaller trees. Some of it is merchantable; some of it is not. We can produce timber that can be used in the rural areas where it is grown to help the economies out there.

But the end goal is to have a healthy forest with larger trees spaced further apart without all the fuel ladders going down to the ground so that, when a fire moves through these areas, it burns at a low temperature through the ground. And guess what. That creates great wildlife habitats when we do that.

There are so many benefits of having a healthy forest, and as a forester, a forester who was trained at a school that was started by Gifford Pinchot, who is the father, along with Teddy Roosevelt, of our Federal forests, it is embarrassing to me what has happened to our Federal lands across this country.

Roosevelt and Pinchot talked about conservation. They talked about leaving our resources in better shape than we found them in. Right now, we are not doing that. We are allowing the lack of management to destroy these resources for future generations. We are allowing the lack of management to emit hundreds of millions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere and also take that vegetation away that provides wildlife habitat, that provides a filter for clean water, and that provides timber that is pulling carbon out of the atmosphere.

We can do better than this. We have provisions in the Resilient Federal Forests Act to allow the Forest Service to actually manage the timber. We require them to do a no-management analysis, because when you look at the dynamic nature of a forest, if you say, ``We are not going to do anything,'' well, you just made a management decision.

Again, the trees are living, growing organisms. Even though the Forest Service says, ``We are not managing it,'' they are going to continue to grow. They are going to fill the growing space. If we continue to suppress fire, the fuel load is going to get worse, and we are going to have more and more forests subject to catastrophic wildfire of, I believe it is, 192 million acres of Federal timberland in this country. About 60 million acres right now, according to the Forest Service, is subject to catastrophic wildfire.

It is time to act. We have waited too long, and the problem continues to get worse. It will continue to get more severe as time moves on if we don't start intervening now.

Mr. Gosar, I want to again thank you for putting this together, for the efforts that you are putting forth so that we can take a proactive stance to make not only our air cleaner by not having all these catastrophic wildfires, but to conserve our forests so that they are healthy, so that they are functioning the way that they should be.

I want to thank you again for all that you are doing, the work for the Western Caucus and all the members here, realizing, on both sides of the aisle, how important it is that we do the right thing, that we pass H.R. 2936, and that we start addressing this problem now.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Arizona for yielding and for his leadership on this, and to my other colleagues from the West, who understand what we face, the problems we face, and what has happened to our forests.

I stand united with all of you in the Western Caucus, because this is something we have done some work on in the past and then we have been stalled out, especially in the last 8 years. I know that President Trump stands with us, wanting to pass legislation, get it down to his desk so he can sign it so we can begin to be better stewards of our great public forests, these public forest lands important to all of us.

As we saw painfully this summer, smoke chokes our citizens, it chokes children. Literally, in my district, elementary school children had to be sent home because of the smoke in their schools because of forest fires.

In Oregon, we have seen some of the worst fires in our State's history. It seemed as if every day came with new reports of more fire, more smoke. While this year's fire season has been particularly intense and devastating, images like these are nothing new for Oregonians. Each summer, smoke has filled our skies in Oregon year after year after year. Vast swaths of our land in our beautiful State are charred.

Unlike private forest owners, the State of Oregon, which I am very proud to be a resident of, and our forest policy and tribal lands and county lands, after a fire, they go in and clean it up, they replant, they get a new, healthy, young forest growing, which if you are concerned about reducing carbon emissions, you want healthy trees, because they actually sequester carbon. Burned, dead, decaying old trees actually emit carbon.

So we can do good things for the ecology of our world by planting new trees after a fire. We will talk about that in a minute.

Smoke inhalation has become a health hazard for Oregonians in their communities. I can't tell you how many in my communities, day after day after day, were given warnings by our health authority that the air was too dangerous to breathe, that it was unhealthy to breathe.

A recent study found that wildfires contribute three times as much fine particulate matter into the air as previously thought, and this definitely can cause respiratory problems and make it difficult to breathe, as the citizens of our great State found this summer.

Wildfires also pollute our atmosphere with carbon. In 2002, the Biscuit fire in southwest Oregon burned more than 500,000 acres, half a million acres. The carbon dioxide emitted during that fire amounted to almost one-quarter of the carbon dioxide emitted in the entire State of Oregon this year.

By the way, we have burned 678,000 acres this year in Oregon at a cost of more than $340 million to fight those fires, State, local, and Federal costs, mostly Federal.

Tomorrow, the Energy and Commerce Committee, which I chair, will hold a hearing to take a look at the air impact of fires, in part because I have constituents who have seen that, in some cases, fires are not aggressively fought if they are in certain federally designated areas, wilderness areas. There is a temptation, apparently, to not use all our tools, and to instead let them burn. That doesn't take into account what happens to air quality and the health of our citizens when fires are allowed to ravage and burn.

So we will take a look at the issues involving air quality and pollutants emitted into the atmosphere and discuss how better management of our

forests could help prevent catastrophic fires and actually protect our airshed and our health.

Each of us today faces a similar situation. Devastating fires ignite across the West as fuel loads build across our public lands--Mr. McClintock did a great job laying that out--while broken Federal forest policy stands in the way of better management, healthier air, protection of our habitat and our watersheds and our streams and our forested communities.

8.2 million acres burned this year. By the way, my colleagues, that is an area larger than Maryland, it is three-and-a-half or so times the size of, I believe, Puerto Rico, which has been wiped out. We talk about the devastation and disaster there and in the Virgin Islands and every other place, but somehow we sort of overlook the fact that we lose this almost every year in our West and in our forested land.

Communities watched their mills close, meanwhile, as Federal policy and lawsuits and litigation has prevented proper management of our forests. So we have lost our jobs, we have lost our infrastructure, we have lost the revenues for our schools, and, in some cases, for basic services like law enforcement.

Now, promises that somehow recreation and outdoor activities would replace those good family-wage jobs, tourism, they are falling short, because guess what, events are being canceled because now the fires are destroying the airshed.

Constituents of mine have been sending photos this year about some of the fires. This one right here is from Mike, who was returning from a hunting trip just a few weeks ago. This was the Eagle Creek fire burning in the scenic Columbia River Gorge area between Cascade Locks and where I live in Hood River.

We had an evacuation notice within a half a mile of where I live on Rand Road. It was level 1, but they had them higher than that as you got closer to this fire.

Meanwhile, events like Cycle Oregon, its 30th anniversary, canceled because of the smoke; Sisters Folk Festival canceled because of the smoke. Down in Ashland, the Oregon Shakespeare Theater, world-renowned festival, they had to cancel nine of their shows at a cost of $400,000 direct revenue loss, not to mention the concerns they have about indirect loss, people who didn't show up for other performances, and might even affect their annual sales.

People are really tired of this. They expect this Congress to take action to try and protect and become good stewards of our national forest land, but this picture tells you what we faced. The Columbia Gorge, where I grew up right near here, I can't remember a time the freeway was closed as long as it was this summer. We had to go over across the river to Washington to our good friends on Highway 14. All the freeway traffic was diverted there, and there is still one lane here that can't pass, because now we are worried about mudslides and rockslides and trees coming down the hillsides.

We need to get back to positive, active management in our Federal forests.

Five years in a row, the U.S. House has enacted legislation, sent it over to the Senate, that would give our professional foresters, our scientists, the tools that they clamor for and need to better manage our forests and reduce the overloading of debris, of dead and dying trees, open up these stands to what they should be naturally, get back in balance with nature. Every year this goes over to the other body, and somehow it never comes back. That has to change.

So tonight, I thank my friend from Arizona who organized this. He knows what forest fires are like in Arizona. My colleague from Washington, my colleague from California, myself, our colleague from Montana, we have dealt with this year after year after year. Now, more than half of the Forest Service budget is spent fighting fire. That is not what we should do as a matter of bad policy.

We need to change Federal policy. We need to let our scientists manage these forests, restore jobs to our forested communities, protect our airsheds, our watersheds, and get back in balance. So I commend my colleagues in the Western Caucus for moving this forward.

I just finished a very positive meeting with the Speaker of the House, who is committed to helping us on this matter. I look forward to us having the opportunity to vote on the Resilient Federal Forests bill and get our Senate colleagues on board as well.

Will the gentleman yield?

Mr. Speaker, I hope they will tune in tomorrow and watch the testimony at that hearing. I think they will get a better understanding of what the people in our districts have faced. For a month this summer, schools had to be closed, festivals canceled, people choking, going to the hospitals. This is serious stuff, and we need to address it.

We appreciate it.

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank Chairman Gosar of the Western Caucus for arranging this Special Order tonight and especially for his exemplary leadership as chairman of the Western Caucus.

The wildfire crisis facing our forests across the West comes down to a very simple adage. Excess timber comes out of the forest one way or the other. It is either carried out or it burns out, but it comes out.

When we carried out our excess timber, we had healthy resilient forests and we had thriving, prosperous communities. Excess timber sales from Federal lands not only generated revenues for our mountain communities, but created thousands of job.

But in the 1970s, we adopted laws like the National Environmental Policy Act and the Endangered Species Act that have resulted in endlessly time-consuming and cost-prohibitive restrictions and requirements that have made the scientific management of our forests virtually impossible.

Timber sales from our Federal lands has dropped 80 percent in the intervening years, with a concomitant increase in forest fires. In California alone, the number of saw mills has

dropped from 149 in 1981 to just 27 today.

Timber that once had room to grow healthy and strong now fights for its life against other trees trying to occupy the same ground.

Average tree density in the Sierra Nevada is three to four times the density that the land can actually support. In this weakened condition, trees lose their natural defenses to drought and disease and pestilence, and they ultimately succumb to catastrophic wildfire.

Three years ago, an estimated 25 million trees in the Sierra fell victim to these stressors. Two years ago, that number doubled to 50 million trees. Last year, more than 100 million dead trees are now waiting to burn in the Sierra.

Well, after 45 years of experience with these environmental laws--all passed with the promise that they would improve our forest environment--I think we are entitled to ask: How's the forest environment doing?

All around us the answer is damning. These laws have not only failed to improve our forest environment, but they are literally killing our forests.

The same politicians responsible for these failed laws have recently conjured up two new excuses. One is climate change. The other is that we are putting out too many fires.

Putting out too many fires?

That invites an important question: Exactly which fires did they propose that we allow to burn?

Perhaps the King fire that almost wiped out the towns of Georgetown and Foresthill on its way to Lake Tahoe in 2014?

Or perhaps the Detwiler fire this year that almost wiped out the town of Mariposa on its way to the Yosemite Valley?

Or any one of the more than 1,000 fires in the Sierra that CAL FIRE has put out this year, any one of which could have grown into a megafire but for the vigilance and competence of our fire agencies?

Which of these fires would they allow to burn into a conflagration?

True, controlled burns play an important role in clearing out underbrush, but as firefighters bitterly complained to me at the command center at the Detwiler fire this year, these same laws make it virtually impossible to get permits to do the controlled burns.

The other reason that we hear is climate change. Well, let's put that to the smell test. Throughout our vast forests, it is often very easy to visually identify the property lines between well-managed private forests and the neglected Federal lands.

Now, I have seen it myself on aerial inspections. The private managed forests are green, healthy, and thriving. The neglected Federal forests are densely overcrowded and often scarred by fire because we can't even salvage the fire-killed timber while it still has value. You can literally tell from the condition of the forest where the property line is. How clever of our climate to know exactly what is the boundary line between private and government lands.

And if carbon dioxide is the problem, doesn't it make sense to mill fully grown trees to sequester the carbon and replace them with young, growing trees that absorb much higher levels of carbon?

But, again, these same laws prevent this.

This is not complicated. Our forests are catastrophically overgrown. Drought is a catalyst. It is not the cause. In overgrown forests, much snow evaporates in dense canopies and cannot reach the ground. The transpiration volume in an overgrown forest is a big problem in a normal rain year; in a drought, it becomes lethal.

Pestilence is a catalyst; it is not a cause. Healthy trees can naturally resist bark beetles; stressed trees cannot.

A properly managed forest matches the tree density to the ability of the land to support it, but we cannot properly manage our forests because of the laws now in place.

Mr. Westerman's Resilient Federal Forests Act and other measures will restore proper scientific management of our national forests, but we are running out of time to enact them, because we are running out of forests to save.

Mr. Speaker, I again thank the gentleman for yielding today, I thank him for his leadership, and I thank him for arranging this hour tonight.

Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank the gentleman from Arizona, my good friend, Mr. Gosar, for holding this Special Order and for giving us the opportunity not only to address the House on this very important issue, but also to address our Nation.

Mr. Speaker, this year alone, over 8 million acres have burned across our country. And get this: ten times that, another 80 million acres, are considered high risk to threat of catastrophic wildfires.

If this doesn't amount to a national disaster, nothing does. If we don't acknowledge that it does, this will only continue to devastate our rural communities across the Nation.

The previous speaker, my friend from Oregon, talked about the impact of the health to people living in these communities. I could attest to you myself, living in central Washington, we had smoke where the visibility was less than a quarter of a mile for weeks at a time. I knew people who had chronic coughs as a result of this smoke. Myself, get this: I had to come back to our Nation's Capital for my cough to clear up over our August break. The air was that bad.

So, Mr. Speaker, this evening, as you have heard from my colleagues from across the Western United States, as we gather to draw attention to this devastation, these catastrophic wildfires, what they pose to our communities, so States from Arkansas to Arizona, from Colorado to California, Montana to New Mexico, from Wyoming, from Oregon, to the great State of Washington, we are here to stress the importance of addressing the broken funding systems as well as the lack of resources that are necessary to adequately prevent and then suppress and fight these wildfires.

So we gather to highlight the dire need to reform the mismanagement of our Federal forests, which leads to the exacerbation of this devastation. Mr. Speaker, we gather to give voice to our often forgotten communities and our constituents.

Now, you have heard these Special Orders before. We as Members of Congress take these good opportunities to simply speak about a problem and bring light to its actuality, to let people know about it, but tonight is different, because my colleagues and I are here not just to talk about this, not just to highlight the major problem of wildfires across the country, but, in fact, we bring good news as well. We offer solutions to this important issue.

So this evening, I rise in support and urge support of two provisions originating right here in Congress, the people's House, to address these issues.

First of all, H.R. 2936, the Resilient Federal Forests Act, which is sponsored by my good friend from the State of Arkansas, Mr. Westerman, which addresses the disastrous consequences of catastrophic wildfires by utilizing tools the Forest Service and other agencies can use to reduce the threats that are posed by wildfires, by insects, by disease infestation, and dangerous old forest overgrowth that serve as a tinderbox for wildfires.

This legislation would enable the necessary management techniques to address our forest health crises and significantly improve the resiliency of our Nation's forests.

On top of that, H.R. 167, the Wildfire Disaster Funding Act, which is sponsored by my good friend and colleague from Idaho, Mr. Simpson, fixes the way that we budget for wildfire suppression by treating these catastrophic wildfires like any other natural disaster, which they are.

Currently, agencies like the Forest Service are forced to borrow funding from accounts outside of their firefighting in order to address these fire suppression costs. This has become known as fire borrowing. This tool was intended to be an extraordinary measure, but in the past 8 of the last 12 years, the Forest Service has had to move funds from other operating accounts to fight these fires.

Mr. Speaker, this problem is systemic, it is dire, and we must address it.

The Wildfire Disaster Funding Act is a necessary solution to solve the crisis.

Mr. Speaker, the fourth district of the State of Washington, which I am proud to call my home, has been devastated by wildfires in recent years, from the Carlton Complex Fire of 2014, which at the time was the largest in State history, to the Okanogan Complex Fire, which only the next year surpassed that record. In addition to that, we lost three firefighters in the process.

Our communities know what it means to live with the overwhelming consequences of continual disastrous wildfires year after year after year, and it doesn't have to be this way. We can solve this problem.

My colleagues and I gather tonight to shed light on this problem and to offer solutions and to let our constituents know that we will not give up in this effort.