Federal Lands Policy

Floor Speech

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Mrs. LUMMIS. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Texas. Texas is a State that has very little Federal land. And the fact that he took the reins as subcommittee chairman for the Committee on Natural Resources Subcommittee on Oversight and has taken such an active interest in this issue is something for which those of us from the public lands States in the West are very grateful. Thank you very much, Mr. Gohmert.

Now, what does this mean on the ground? What we have told you tonight is roughly 640 million acres of this country, or about 30 percent--1 in 3 acres in this country--are owned by the Federal Government. So we have gotten that far.

We have also told you that there are a variety of Federal agencies that own this land. The biggest one is the Bureau of Land Management, BLM, which is under the umbrella of the Department of the Interior. The BLM manages about 250 million acres, and 99.9 percent of that BLM land is in the 11 Western States and Alaska.

So this is an agency that really doesn't deal with 38 of the States. It only deals with 12. But those States are so dramatically affected by this agency, if you combine those 250 million acres, roughly, that BLM manages, that is like the States of Colorado, Arizona, Nevada, and Iowa combined. It is a huge geographic area.

It is not taxed. It is off the property tax rolls. So that is why our schools and other public services in our 11 Western States and Alaska are so impacted by the presence of BLM land. We are given payments in lieu of taxes, but they are not the equivalent of getting taxes, and they are certainly not something that we can count on every year. Some years Congress gives PILT money and some years it does not, so it is not a reliable source of revenue for these States. Yet they are tremendously impacted by these lands.

The science has changed so much, but our statutory scheme in managing these lands has not caught up to the better science that we have today. For example, let's look at this picture. I hope you can see it from where you are sitting. Some of the brownish areas are land that has not been logged. The trees are clogged close together. They have small diameters. They are competing for moisture, for root space, for the nutrients in the soil. Because they are so crowded together, they become less healthy. Bark beetles and other forest killers are killing them out. So what you are seeing here in the crammed areas is unhealthy forests that have not been logged.

Now, what you are seeing in these green, beautiful areas has been logged. So what has happened there? There has been selective logging. It has been done with the natural contours of the landscape. It has been done in the high ground, so you can keep some high mountain meadows that help keep snow and a source of grass growing below the tree canopy for wildlife, hopefully keeping them in the high country longer in the year. Furthermore, those trees can breathe; they are better resistant to disease; they are healthier and better resistant to fires.

One of the big consequences of having overcrowded, unhealthy, unlogged forests is these massive wildfires that we have been having these last few years. That is bad public policy that was probably generated by people who were well intentioned, who thought that we were overlogging, so their viewpoint was to quit logging, when, in fact, that made matters worse. Instead of quitting logging, we should have been more selective and more careful using silviculture techniques and horticulture techniques that have been proven in the 21st century.

Let's look at grazing, which is a more common use of BLM land. What we have found--and I strongly encourage you to go listen to this TED Talk. If you have ever listened to a TED Talk, this is one of the best ones I have ever heard by a man named Allan Savory. So get on TED Talks, go to Allan Savory, and you will finally understand what I have been saying here for 8 years about 21st century grazing practices.

As it happens, Allan Savory, who is probably the preeminent global expert on grazing, has his ranch in Zimbabwe, and the areas that he was working in Zimbabwe were horribly, horribly eroded. They attributed it to overgrazing. They were worried that there were too many elephants, so they did a massive killing off of thousands of elephants, only to find out that was not the cause.

When they changed their grazing practices and put four times as many split-hoofed animals, meaning cattle or sheep or goats, on that land and herded them, it actually made the grass healthier. Grass grew back in stronger stands of grass. They sequester more carbon, so it is good for carbon capture and sequestration, and the grass stands were healthier. Eroded draws healed up; the grasses came back.

These practices were brought to the United States. Interestingly, my family purchased some land on the ranch next door to us that had a Savory grazing system on it. It had 2,600 acres that were divided into 16 smaller pastures, with the water source in the middle, and we would move our cattle among these 16 small cells; and you would put all of them in one cell for a very short period of time, maybe 10 days, and they would graze that grass down to the nubs.

They would eat the grass that was more palatable, but they would also eat the noxious weeds, and then you move them. So you continue to move them among these 16 cells on 2,600 acres. As we grazed that way, we found out that healthy stands of grass, palatable grass, good buffalo grass, short grass, prairie grasses were thriving. The noxious weeds were declining. The eroded draws were healing. There was more opportunity to sequester carbon.

When you concentrate cattle into those small areas, their manure becomes a tremendously valuable source of fertilizer. The grass stand is healthier. This process was proven in Africa in grazing, and it is being done successfully all over the United States. Please go to the Allan Savory TED Talk. You will understand what I am saying. What he shows on that TED Talk, I have experienced on my own land.

We should be doing that on BLM land. We have BLM land that is overgrazed, and some people come here to Congress and say, well, if you would just take cattle and sheep off the public lands, it is just being overgrazed, then we can have as many wild horses as we want. The problem with that is, wild horses have a solid hoof, so when they pound the ground with their solid hoof, they are compacting the soil. When it rains, it runs off instead of seeping into the soil.

If you put cattle, goats, sheep, elk, deer, moose that have split hooves on that ground, they actually knead the soil with their hoof action, and it develops an opportunity for more of that rain to seep into the ground. It is a better grazing ungulate. We have learned all this recently. This is not 21st century science. This is late 20th century and now 21st century science.

The problem is our statutes were passed in the 1970s when the thought was we should concentrate power and authority and public input into Washington, and we should make these grazing policies and forestry policies out of Washington because the people in the States can't be trusted. They will overlog, and they will overgraze to line their pockets. You know, it is just not true anymore, but our statutes are stuck in a 1970s command-and-control scheme.

So we need to update our statutes to reflect our greater understanding of logging and grazing and how mankind can actually benefit and sustain these resources and improve these resources well into the 21st century. We owe it to our children and grandchildren.

I thank Mr. Gohmert so much.

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