WATERSHED AND FISH HABITAT DEGRADA- 

 TION ON PUBLIC LANDS AND NATIONAL 

 FORESTS IN THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST 



THURSDAY, MARCH 11, 1993 



House of Representatives, Committee on Natural 

 Resources, Subcommittee on National Parks, For- 

 ests AND Public Lands, 



Washington, DC. 



The subcommittee met, pursuant to call, at 10 a.m. in room 2253, 

 Raybum House Office Building, Hon. Bruce F. Vento (chairman of 

 the subcommittee) presiding. 



OPENING STATEMENT OF CHAHIMAN VENTO 



Mr. Vento. The meeting will come to order. We have tight quar- 

 ters here. In fact these days it is hard to get rooms to hold our 

 hearings. I think as a committee we came up short in terms of 

 rooms, but I guess we have an historically preserved room. 



In any case, we have an ambitious agenda this morning and into 

 the afternoon with a series of votes scheduled on the Floor, and I'm 

 sure other Members have business as I do. So we will try to make 

 it a successful hearing in terms of listening to our witnesses and 

 maybe getting some dialogue on this important topic. 



Yesterday, of course, the President began the season on the topic 

 of problems in the Pacific Northwest by keeping his commitment 

 to hold a forest summit in early April. So we look forward to that, 

 to the administration's positive involvement in bringing together 

 all the resources of the national government, all the agencies and 

 departments into a coherent policy dealing with the series of prob- 

 lems with the temporate rain forests of the Pacific Northwest. 



Today, of course, we're focusing on one important aspect of that 

 in terms of the land management and the impact on the fisheries 

 in the Pacific Northwest. 



The American people have a spectacular natural resource, the 

 salmon and steelhead runs that extend from the Pacific to central 

 Idaho. Two summers ago I stood on the banks of a small stream 

 in the Chamberlain Basin, in the heart of Idaho's Frank Church- 

 River of No Return wilderness and watched a Chinook king salm- 

 on, a beat-up fish, that had traveled almost a thousand miles fi'om 

 the ocean to return to it is birthplace to spawn. I felt a sense of 

 awe, as I'm sure most of you would standing in my shoes, witness- 

 ing this phenomenon, because this salmon was one of only a few 

 left in a salmon run that some time ago numbered in the thou- 



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