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the incidence of fire and its relationship to salvage and the manner 

 in which the forests are managed. 



And secondly, I wanted to raise the question about reducing the 

 total volume of salvage that might be occurring, even though you 

 have right now what many would describe as an aggressive pro- 

 gram, one which, in fact, limits the application of various proce- 

 dures and process which, I think, really in the end is not going to 

 be helpful. But in any case, it does truncate many of the laws and 

 other process that have normally been followed, but will, in fact, 

 because of drought, because of other factors, really overshadow 

 what happens in terms of salvage sales, not the least of which one 

 is, of course, that you cannot sell the salvage. If you, in fact, pre- 

 pare the sale, you cannot force people to buy it because there are 

 market forces and/or other issues that deal with profitability. 



So my two questions, one deals with giving a shot on fire, and 

 second on reducing the total amount of salvage that is in our na- 

 tional forests by virtue of this law or any other. 



Mr. Lyons. I would say, Mr. Vento, that we believe with these 

 additional directive and clarification offered by the Secretary, we 

 are going to be within the goal that we agreed to with the Congress 

 as a part of the salvage rider that was on the Recision Act. 



With regard 



Mr. Vento. Let me just interject, though, that the law that was 

 read here said that you would reduce the total amount of salvage 

 available in the forests. 



Mr. Lyons. The law directed us to address the backlog that ex- 

 ists, and I would say that there is certainly a tremendous amount 

 of work that needs to be done to improve forest health. Salvage is 

 one portion of that. 



I will let Jack address silviculturally what it is we are trjdng to 

 tackle. 



Mr. Thomas. Without giving a long speech, this issue is so politi- 

 cized that everybody is losing focus here. We have a forest health 

 problem, in my opinion, when we define what is healthy, and 

 healthy enough for what. It took us a long time to get there. We 

 would not get out of this with the salvage rider, with or without 

 it. This is a small portion of the problem. 



Salvage can be part of the solution. Sometimes salvage is to 

 make some silvicultural treatment, to fireproof. Sometimes salvage 

 is just salvage because it makes sense. We can do it, achieve some 

 objectives of getting ready for regeneration, that we can provide 

 jobs, we can provide wood to the mills. Sometimes salvage is just 

 salvage. 



This issue needs to be a broader discussion. This salvage rider 

 is a blip. When it is over, no matter what our achievement is, we 

 still have a very large problem that we have to collectively address 

 in some intelligent fashion. 



I will make my little speech now. I hate to see us so diverted by 

 this particular question that we lose focus on the larger questions 

 that we have to address. This is just part of it. We do have salvage 

 we can do. We were already aggressively moving ahead with sal- 

 vage. But I am afraid that all of this argument is beginning to di- 

 vert us from the real question of how v/e address those questions 

 that have evolved over a very long period of time. This will not get 



