REHABILITATION, REFORESTATION AND RE- 

 INVESTMENT ON PUBLIC LANDS AND NA- 

 TIONAL FORESTS OF THE PACIFIC NORTH- 

 WEST 



TUESDAY, MARCH 30, 1993 



House of Representatives, 

 Subcommittee on National Parks, 



Forests and Public Lands, 

 Committee on Natural Resources, 



Washington, DC. 



The subcommittee met, pursuant to call, at 10:05 a.m., in room 

 1364, Raybum House Office Building, Hon. Bruce F. Vento (chair- 

 man of the subcommittee), presiding. 



Mr. Vento. The subcommittee will come to order. 



OPENING STATEMENT OF CHAIRMAN VENTO 



The subcommittee is meeting today to conduct an oversight hear- 

 ing on rehabilitation, reforestation and reinvestment in public 

 lands and national forests of the Pacific Northwest. The debate has 

 raged for several years on how much more timber should be cut in 

 the Pacific Northwest. That is not necessarily the focus today. In- 

 stead, we will focus on Federal lands that have already been cut 

 and the means and opportunities that are available to restore those 

 lands to the healthy and biologically diverse forests they once were. 



We are at the beginning of a new era for the national forests and 

 public lands of the Pacific Northwest. The management of these 

 lands in the future will be dramatically different from the manage- 

 ment of the past. The courts, the Confess, the administration, and 

 the American people have been sending a strong message to the 

 Forest Service and to the Bureau of Land Management to change 

 the emphasis from cutting and selling timber and to make the 

 maintenance and restoration of biological diversity and complex 

 ecosystems the management of the future. So significant is the 

 need for this change that this week the President, the Vice Presi- 

 dent and two Cabinet Secretaries are in the Northwest to explore 

 ways to make this change happen — to initiate that process. 



During the old era of Federal forest management in the North- 

 west the timber program was king. The bulk of the funding and 

 personnel for the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management 

 was focused on producing timber for commercial logging through 

 the 1980s. The Forest Service sold, in the 1980s, between 4 and 5 

 billion board feet a year, I might say at the requirement of Con- 

 gress, and in those days over 1 billion board feet all too often in 



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