Healthy forests key to averting tragedies

Healthy forests key to averting tragedies

By Paul Gosar

When it comes to wildfires, recent years have proven devastating to Arizona and many of the western states. The tragic Yarnell Hill Fire, which claimed the lives of 19 elite Hotshot firefighters, is still a fresh and painful wound throughout Arizona. Fires in other western states like Colorado's Black Forest wildfire and California’s Rim Fire also caused great destruction.

We must ensure that we are doing everything we can to prevent future tragedies.

Although it is impossible to prevent all fires, federal, state and local land management policies can make them less frequent and less intense when they burn. By maintaining healthy forests, we can improve public safety, save endangered species and put people back to work.

As a rural Arizonan and a member of the House Natural Resources Committee, I am fighting for policies that facilitate more active forest management on federal lands. This means smarter spending and better, more effective tools to implement ecological health projects like the Four Forest Restoration Initiative (4FRI) and the White Mountain Stewardship Project. 

Overgrown forests are susceptible to wildfire, so prevention starts with responsible thinning. Approximately 80 million acres of forest across the West are overgrown. There are now hundreds of trees per acre on lands that once contained only 10 to 25 trees per acre.

Our budgets should prioritize wildfire prevention instead of focusing primarily on response. Although the need to suppress fires is never going to go away, we must shift our priority towards proactive management of our federal lands. 

My bipartisan legislation, the Catastrophic Wildfire Prevention Act, addresses many of these issues. It passed the House earlier this year as part of a larger forest health package, the Restoring Healthy Forests for Healthy Communities Act, and the Senate already held a hearing on it. 

My bill eliminates red tape, streamlines wildfire-prevention projects, improves local coordination and brings more accountability to the process.  It will expedite the review and approval process for thinning and grazing projects, so that wildfire-prevention projects can move forward quickly when the public is at-risk. It also gets the government out of the way and empowers the private sector to create rural jobs by resurrecting the timber industry, as loggers thin millions of acres of overgrown forests.

Congress can fight fires on federal lands before they even start through pro-active land management policies like those included in my Catastrophic Wildfire Prevention Act. I’m optimistic that Congress will enact comprehensive forest health legislation next year that will help prevent destructive wildfires as well as stimulate our rural economies.

This op-ed appeared in the print edition of The Arizona Republic on December 29, 2013.