56 



percent. Dale Robertson omitted that the cut had gone up 109 per- 

 cent, in addition to the fact that these figures combine hardwood 

 and softwood. 



President Bush, before he went to Rio in 1992, said that annual 

 forest growth now exceeds timber harvest by 37 percent, nationally, 

 and the total national volume of wood is 25 percent greater than 

 it was in 1952. 



That Forest Service data combines hardwoods and softwoods. 

 When you strip out the hardwoods, there is still a net gain in 

 softwoods. So the question raised is that with a national expansion 

 of our softwood inventory and with growth greater than cut, does 

 it make sense to sell national forest timber, when it creates a fi- 

 nancial loss to our deficit-ridden Government; or, environmental 

 conservatism is a wiser choice to make? 



Why does the Forest Service sell timber at a loss? It is because 

 it prices its timber based upon the agency estimate of the value of 

 the timber to the buyer, not the agency cost to grow, manage, pro- 

 tect and supply the timber to industry, and that is a significant dif- 

 ference. 



We've been doing this for years this way. It is the way we started 

 doing it. We just keep on doing it. The Forest Service does not real- 

 ly have a good system of tracking what its costs are. 



Now, don't misunderstand me, Mr. Rose. I believe subsidies are 

 part of the American way of life. We subsidize a lot of things. The 

 question is, how much do you subsidize something, why do you sub- 

 sidize it, where, and what should the test be? 



The Forest Service doesn't track representative sample costs for 

 timber sales, as required by section 6(1) of the National Forest 

 Management Act. And that was a provision that Congressman 

 George Brown authored. Here it is, almost 20 years later, and they 

 don't do this sort of tracking. It's just complete ignoring of the law. 



How much of these two forests should be in a giant Sequoia pre- 

 serve is a matter for the committee to decide. I made a number of 

 suggestions in my statement. You can look at them and see wheth- 

 er any of them have any merit. 



But I think the key point is that particularly the Sequoia Na- 

 tional Forest, and to some extent the Sierra Nevada, are affected 

 by subsidized timber sales. You are not being asked to give up net 

 Treasury income — profit, that is — ^to save the unique giant sequoia, 

 or to reduce logging. 



One of the other points that I would make is community stabil- 

 ity. You will hear a lot of pitches about community stability. If I 

 had a sawmill, I would want all the timber I could get, no matter 

 where I got it from. 



I used to buy private timber. I worked as a private forester. You 

 don't care about what it costs somebody else to grow the timber. 

 You pay them what you can afford to pay them. 



But private forest owners don't have to sustain the cut or the en- 

 vironment, and timber companies never have to make a binding 

 commitment to stay in business. And if you have any doubt about 

 that, just think of the saga of the Mt. Whitney Lumber Company, 

 as you hear talk about the Sequoia. They had a mill at 

 Johnsondale. It's long gone. And it's long gone because it wasn't fi- 

 nancially feasible for them to continue. 



