75 



I think we heard the IG say that they were upset with the BLM, 

 that they were losing an opportunity to make money on some lands 

 because they weren't planting them quickly enough. That is some- 

 what opposite from the amount of money that you could make if 

 {rou actually harvested. Right now, you are losing billions and bil- 

 ions of dollars because you have sales held up that have been sold 

 that are unharvested. Those, obviously, will lead to reforestation 

 needs that would, obviously, lead to new forests. 



Second, I heard a lot of talk about ecosystem system manage- 

 ment, but at the same time I hear a lot of talk about setting aside 

 areas. I think if you look at our National Forests across the coun- 

 try, there is a very large need for managing these areas to main- 

 tain the forest's health, and Mr. LaRocco s bill and Mr. Sampson's 

 efforts to gain attention for that we support because we believe you 

 have forests that have been mismanaged through the preclusion of 

 fire and the preclusion of active management practices. Now we 

 have a tremendous cost facing us to deal with those. 



If you look at the Blue Mountain forests in eastern Oregon, we 

 have 50 percent of the trees dead. We are not being able to salvage 

 that volume. That is not generating any revenues that could be 

 used for planting or harvesting of the trees or rehabilitating those 

 sites. The Forest Service is going to come to this Congress at some 

 point if people want trees on that land, £ind they are going to be 

 asking for tremendous amounts of money to do that job. We are not 

 so convinced that the budgets we have seen proposed will allow for 

 that. That is an irony that we need to address. Ecosystem manage- 

 ment is one way to address it, but you cannot say let's set aside 

 everything in these djoiamic processes and just preserve them and 

 expect them to last, particularly in the inner mountain forests 

 which tend to get to a certain age and die, and if you look at the 

 age distribution in the inner mountain country, we have many for- 

 ests that are sitting right on the edge of that time period where 

 they start to fall apart. 



Timber harvesting and our K-V system and the B-D system that 

 we have do lay out a format where money does go from the pur- 

 chaser back to the agency that allows you to do a lot of that work. 



The final irony that I saw, and I guess it hit home when I was 

 eating lunch and I saw all the beer distributors in town here with 

 buttons that say, "Beer tax will cost 80,000 jobs." We are talking 

 about goin^ from an economy that produces not only money out of 

 the woods m terms of salaries for loggers but also produces money 

 for the sawmillers tmd the people that work in those jobs and the 

 distributors of wood products. I know there is a lot of talk about 

 retraining, and I was kind of hoping for a beer distributorship, but 

 I don't think I am going to get that now. 



It is very important when we look at rehabilitating the forests 

 and those jobs that we understand that those forests and that econ- 

 omy are very truncated. Yes, you can plant trees and you go thin 

 trees and you can make a living at that, but that does not support 

 entire communities in a similar fashions that sawmills have, and 

 that needs to be taken into account as we move forward in this. 



That is not to say that the forests don't need to be rehabilitated; 

 I think both things should occur. We should be able to harvest stuf*" 

 on National Forests because we do have age class distribution ' 



