Mrs. CHENOWETH. Then the next one is the cost of the wildfires. 

 We've seen that the incidence of heavy wildfires have gone up dra- 

 matically in 1994 and then again this year. Then the green ribbon 

 is the cost of these wildfires. It looks like the cost so far in 1996 

 for the fires that is demonstrated by the red line to the right of the 

 cost, and that's on an angle, is exceeding what it did in 1994 and 

 that we truly have historically large wildfires in the West that are 

 more costly per acre than they were even in 1994. Is that correct? 



Mr. Neuenschwander. That's correct. 



Mrs. Chenoweth. And then the final one, Mr. Chairman, is trees 

 per acre in douglas fir western snowberry habitat type. This is a 

 sample in the Boise National Forest. We apparently had the indige- 

 nous species of ponderosa pine for a very long time, and then we 

 begin to see the intrusion of douglas fir and other species. So that 

 now we're seeing far more fires because those species are not na- 

 tive to that area. Is that what is happening? 



Mr. Neuenschwander. Well they are native. They're just in- 

 creasing in density, and the net result of that, going back to the 

 National Geographic, is what I call a current condition, which is 

 many young trees per acre, and when the forests can no longer 

 support all those trees as they grow up they die. In fact, on this 

 particular slide here that you're showing somewhere around half of 

 those trees are dead already because of insects, disease, drought 

 and so forth. So the fires would stay on the surface in the 1700's 

 to 1906 and then jump into the crowns in 1993, 1994, 1995 and 

 1996. 



Mrs. Chenoweth. Thank you, Dr. Neuenschwander, and thank 

 you for coming so far and giving such valuable testimony. 



Mr. Neuenschwander. Thank you very much. 



Chairman Hansen. Mr. Herger, do you have any questions for 

 these two panelists? 



Mr. Herger. No. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 



Chairman Hansen. I want to thank you for coming. I think this 

 has been very informative. A lot of us are very frustrated over the 

 amount of fires we've had in the area. 



I recently was in the Dixie National Forest with the Forest Su- 

 pervisor, Hugh Thompson, and I couldn't believe how many dead 

 trees we've got. I mean I've lived my entire life in Utah on and off 

 when there have been various places I've had to go, but that has 

 always been looked at as one of those beautiful, beautiful forests. 

 Now we've got dead trees all over the place in Iron County and 

 Garfield County, and a lot of that is because of the pine beetle that 

 has been in there and killing those areas, and then lawsuits from 

 environmental groups have restricted the use of harvesting. 



Harvesting traditionally has been the way we've gone in and got- 

 ten these things out, and now we've got dead trees. I've got pictures 

 of dead trees and green trees that are dead, and that's going to 

 take years and years to come back. Not to editorialize, but I really 

 worry sometimes about the mentality that says just let mother na- 

 ture take care of it. 



In my experience of 16 years on this Committee we have been 

 manipulating the forests for many, many years, and out of that 

 we've had prescribed fires, cleaned out the dead wood, pretreated 



