Charles Taylor

Mr. TAYLOR of North Carolina

Mr. TAYLOR of North Carolina. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Chairman, I would agree with the gentleman from West Virginia that he is not attempting to change any of the restrictions that were placed on legal services last year. But part of the deal, part of the agreement that was placed in legal services was there was to be a reduction, a gradual reduction. Rather then zeroing out legal services, we agreed that it would be taken down to $141 million. Now the gentleman proposes to nearly double that amount, breaking that agreement. How long will it be that we say those other restrictions placed on legal services are unnecessary and then we will be wanting to take those off. Let us look at the history, 20 years of history of an organization that did not help the poor. It in fact punished the poor and used them as an excuse for a very liberal agenda. The Legal Services Corporation supported drug dealers against public housing authorities, tax-paid public housing authorities. It voted to keep illegal immigrants in even while we were paying the INS and other Federal agencies to try to stem the flow of illegal immigrants. It supported appeals and worked against the prison systems of this country to separate patients with AIDS from other prisoners in order to stem the spread of AIDS inside prison systems. It moved in other areas, in one case to support a rapist to get custody of the child, the product of his rape, even though that rapist had two other illegitimate children, was in jail, and his psychiatrist said he was in no position to be a parent of any children. All of this is the legacy and the history of the Legal Services Corporation. I would like to point out, Mr. Chairman, that legal services in this Nation will not end if we maintain the reduction, agreed upon reduction to $141 million. First of all, let us talk about legal services. It is really two areas of legal services in this country. First of all, there is the Big Government legal services that the gentleman from West Virginia, [Mr. Mollohan] wants to double the funding for, the one that has had 20 years of abuse in this country. There is the great portion, the majority of legal services, which are small community-based legal services organizations. The poor will not be denied free legal services. Even legal service organizations, nontaxpayer organizations receive more than the majority of the funding of all legal services, as a matter of fact in this country, and comes from non-tax paid sources. In the last 5 years, nonfederal funds for legal services grew by 82 percent and continues to grow. The American Bar Association's directory of 1993-94 listed over 900 pro bono legal services organizations, services not funded by the U.S. taxpayer, not part of the Big Government legal services that is being debated here today. There are millions of dollars of increases in interest on lawyers' trust accounts; IOLTA is the term. Over 25 States including California and New York have increased their IOLTA grants by 21 percent. North Carolina alone increased its grant by $1.2 million. These funds are increases. These go into community-based legal services programs. There are not funded by the U.S. taxpayers. These are not Big Government programs. Numerous national organizations contribute to legal services aids today: United Way, the NAACP, the ACLU and others. Eighty percent of the bar still is not participating in pro bono programs. There is room, plenty of room with 80 percent of the bar to participate and increase its pro bono service. The difference in efficiency between the Big Government program being advocated and my friend from West Virginia wants to double the funding for, it is much more inefficient than the local community-based organization. Now, is that not a surprise when the Federal Government gets involved, it always costs more. For instance in Chicago, the private legal services in Chicago, some 25,000 inquiries, the average price was about $80 per case. In Chicago they operated that service with nine staff people. The 79-person staff, nationally funded, Big Government legal services supported program cost $250 per case. And that is really no surprise when we consider that, any time the Federal Government is involved, there is usually more cost, and it moves more toward political correctness and liberalism than it does toward service for the poor. Taxpayer money is being used in the Big Government legal services to fight tax-paid organizations. Let me give my colleagues an instance. In one case there was a woman, an unmarried woman with a child, a drug addict. The child was taken away by the social services for its protection because the woman clearly was incapable of handling the child. Legal services sues the social services agency to get the child back. The woman then beats the child to death within 2 weeks after getting the child back. Here is a tax-paid organization, in this particular case, who used their best judgment, the medical authorities. They had to make a ruling on behalf of the citizens of the country in removing the child for its safety. Here is the taxpayer, large government, legal services suing the social services for the mother to get the child back. What I am saying, we do not have the information to support that kind of suit. There was a suit to give the child back, not what the measure of damage was or threat to the child or anything else. This was strictly a suit to get the child returned to the mother. Now, there are many other cases that we can show where legal services fights federally funded agencies with tax-paid dollars. It would make much more sense to reform those agencies if necessary. Where does the gentleman from West Virginia [Mr. Mollohan] suggest we get the funds to shift to the Big Government legal services? First of all, he wants to take $12 million from our Federal courts even as we put more and more cases on our courts, and it is necessary for those court cases to be had to get violent criminals off the street. Mr. Chairman, $14 million would come from the State Department's consular services although we would slow down drastically visitation and legal immigration into this country; $45 million from the Federal prison system at a time when we need to increase prison system funding, here again to address the question of violent criminals. I remind the House that this program never has been authorized in its history, that for 20 years it did not keep time records. It did not allow auditing, and the agreement that was made last year to bring about those reforms also called for the reduction to go to $141 million which we should keep in this House. I urge the House to vote against the Mollohan amendment. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. TAYLOR of North Carolina. Mr. Chairman, I seek the time in opposition.

Mr. TAYLOR of North Carolina

Mr. TAYLOR of North Carolina. Mr. Chairman, I appreciated the support of the gentleman from Wisconsin [Mr. Obey] for this bill, and I would tell him today that he has been misinformed about green timber being cut in the salvage area. The Senate included 318 language for the Pacific Northwest. The President endorsed 318 in his option 9,318, by the way, will expire September 30. Therefore, it is really moot, because this bill probably will not be passed much before September 30. So 318, whether it was good, bad or indifferent, will be moot in a few weeks. The salvage bill has not had green healthy timber cut. As has been explained by the gentleman from Washington [Mr. Dicks], and I explain also, when you have disease, you cut a periphery area where the insects are in a given tree. I would say to the gentleman from Wisconsin [Mr. Obey], when you were not on the floor I laid out a challenge offering $1,000 if someone could show us a green tree that had been cut in the salvage areas that was not infected or was not part of that proposal. The thought that we have had 50 percent of the timber that has been cut so far in the salvage areas has been healthy green timber, unfortunately, has not been the case. The Forest Service is under such pressure, they are watching this stick by stick. Nothing came out in the hearings we had across the country. No accusation was made that a single stem of green timber had been cut in the salvage operation. Much of that has been confused with the trees that were cut in the 318 program in Oregon, which had nothing to do with the timber salvage. So, Mr. Chairman, I would urge that this amendment be defeated.

Mr. TAYLOR of North Carolina. Mr. Chairman, my good friend, the gentleman from Illinois, Sid Yates, and I have served together on the committee and gone back and forth on questions of forestry. There is enormous pressure in this country from organizations that take in hundreds of millions of dollars, scaring people, and they want to continue to do that. That is why a lot of misinformation has been put out. I am afraid some of my colleagues have gotten hold of it and believed it. Mr. Chairman, my colleague who got up a moment ago and said that we had cut green trees in salvage, it is absolutely misinformed. I will pay $1,000 cash today if anyone can bring me evidence of any green tree that has been cut under the salvage bill. We are not talking about the 3-18 amendment that was made taking older sales that were set aside long ago and had been under appeal, we are talking about the salvage bill. For instance, I have seen a piece of information here showing pictures put out by folks who said, ``The tree below is more than 700 years ago. It was cut down because Congress passed a salvage rider which has allowed large-scale harvesting of America's oldest and most valuable trees.'' I presume that is talking about the 3-18 sales which Mr. Clinton endorsed under his option 9. It has to be, because the picture was made in March of 1995, about 4 months before the salvage legislation passed. So it would be impossible for salvage and difficult for that to be involved in 3-18. Mr. Chairman, the situation that we find with other pictures, last night we were shown a picture on the floor that purportedly was damaged by logging roads. In the Senate, that picture was used months ago, and it was supposed to be salvage damage. It looks like something out of the 1890's, with tailings from a mine. Soon it will be used in the debate for the Johnstown flood. I do not know what we are proving by bringing up photographs that purport to show damage in forests that were taken months and sometimes years before the bills were even passed. But clearly this is misrepresentation. The timber salvage legislation that was passed is doing its job. It is doing it slowly, because there is much resistance from the administration; not inside the Forest Service, but from the administration. We are finding in the South as to disease-infected timber, it is already being put on for sale, and it is important that that be done, because if we have 100 acres of insect-infested timber inside the Forest Service, if you do not take out the host trees, and that includes some green trees, because trees that are dead or the insect has already left, they are hosting in the periphery green trees around it. So when the forest silviculturist goes in, he has to determine those trees where the host is. Some of those trees are still green, but they will be dead in a matter of weeks or months, so he cuts out the area where the disease, where the insect is, and he harvests that. The Forest Service has been very careful, being under the watchful spotlight of Congress, it has been very careful to see that nowhere has it abused it, and we cannot find a single example of that abuse that has been presented to Congress, either in our hearings on salvage or in any other area. We are beginning to remove diseased, dead, and dying timber from the forest. It is being done profitably at the individual sales, and it is being done in a way that is good for the environment. Nowhere can I find these people who rave and rant because of the pressure from environmental organizations that they are saving the forest, can they say what are they going to do when they destroy the use of wood. The Sierra Club voted 2 to 1, no cutting in the national forests. When we kill the jobs, kill the harvesting of our forests, when we no longer have wood for the tables and the multitude of chemicals and other things we use it for, they do not tell you that we have to replace it with finite, finite materials such as plastic, where the oil has to be imported, where the toxicity and spills in manufacturing as much greater than it is in wood processing, and that is harmful to the environment. No. The information being put out that I just mentioned, that is false information and misleading information, is what is being used, and serves as environmentalism today. We need honest debate on this question, and we need to keep the timber salvage bill.

Mr. TAYLOR of North Carolina. Mr. Chairman, I hear time and time again from the other side they are for salvage sales. We had salvage sales. Then we had an appeals process that rendered salvage sales useless because the appeals would go on for years. Most of us know this timber has to be cut within 6 to 24 months. So it rendered the whole question of salvage moot, and they know that, because they want no lumber cut, no timber cut in forests. Today in the Committee on Resources there was a host of people from Montana. The gentleman says he watches tree by tree. Commissioners and foresters were there testifying saying salvage is the greatest thing that has happened to Montana. I would suggest the gentleman talk to those people. They are probably still in town.

Mr. TAYLOR of North Carolina

Mr. TAYLOR of North Carolina. Mr. Chairman, reclaiming my time, does the gentleman recognize that a great portion of the recreation that people go to fish, hunt, camp or picnic, they go to those areas on roads built under the program, as well as a great portion of our trails?

Mr. TAYLOR of North Carolina. If the gentleman will continue to yield, if we are improving those roads in the forests against environmental hazards, reseeding and so forth, is it not better to spend that money in the national forest on environmental improvements than spend it in the parks where environment is not a concern?

Mr. TAYLOR of North Carolina. Mr. Chairman, the gentleman is trying to make believe that all recreation in this country in forests is done in the national parks. There is probably more recreation in forests than there is in national parks, and it is a multiple use. There is hunting, for instance, in the national forests, whereas in many parks there is no hunting. Most people are accessible to national forests far more than they are to national parks, and also many national parks have been put aside in limited type of recreational use. If we cut recreational road money, which the gentleman is suggesting, for the forest, we will be denying people access to the forest for recreation while purporting to help them out in the park where we already put $50 million for maintenance, is that not so?

Mr. TAYLOR of North Carolina. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the requisite number of words. Mr. Chairman, over the years I served with the gentleman from Minnesota [Mr. Vento] in the Interior Committee and worked with the gentleman there, I have tried diligently to teach forestry to him and I have not had much success. We are good friends and I appreciate his interest in this area and before I leave Congress it is a goal of mine to make clear to him what this program is all about. There is no subsidy in the forest road system. First of all, the timber is sold by the national forests on a bid basis. The bid has two components. First of all, I bid what I am going to buy if I am a bidder for that timber that is put on sale by the Forest Service. Part of my bid includes the fact that I would be given credit for building a road to the Forest Service's specification, because the Forest Service in many cases plans to use that for recreation and other purposes. They may want it built to a much higher standard than you need to harvest the timber. They may plan to use it as their trail program. A great portion of the trails either for walking or horseback riding in our national forests comes from roads that were built to harvest timber and then kept and maintained for the purposes of recreation. So I get that credit. If the Forest Service did not give that credit to the person bidding, then the bid would be lower, therefore, it would be the same thing. The Forest Service would have to build it themselves at the cost that they are giving me credit for, or they would give me credit and I would build it. So it is a wash. There is no subsidy. There is a wash to the program when you are bidding timber. Unfortunately, what the gentleman from Minnesota [Mr. Vento] is talking about, and he is confusing it to some extent, if you are taking $24 million in new money and transferring it over to the park, it does not come from the Forest Credit Program for road credit. What it comes from is the program to upgrade existing roads. They have over 1,700 miles of old roads that are already built that they are going to try to raise standards on. This is an anti-environmental vote if Members vote with the gentleman from Minnesota [Mr. Vento] because part of this money that he is going to be taking is being used to upgrade the environmental standards of that road. They are going to reseed, try to cut sedimentation. Some of the money is going to be spent to upgrade the roads for recreational purposes, perhaps to raise weight limits on bridges and other areas to allow recreational vehicles to be involved. You are jeopardizing public safety and the environment by transferring the money over to the Park Service. As the chairman of the Interior Appropriations Committee pointed out, there has been close to $55 million put into park maintenance. To many people in the United States, they really do not know the difference between national parks and national forests when it comes to recreation because they may go to a national forest and camp or fish or carry out all the same things they would do, hike, as they would do in a national park. If we cut the money for maintaining their recreational roads which the gentleman from Minnesota [Mr. Vento] is suggesting into the national forest and give it to the national park, what have we accomplished? If more people are going to the forest, the people need that road improvement in the forest just as much as they would need maintenance in the national park. And so we are not making a statement for the recreational user by taking money out of a forest where they now recreate and putting it into a park maybe that has less recreational use. Finally, I would like to point out, all this talk about subsidy, about losing money in national forests, the GAO--and the gentleman I think misquoted them a moment ago--pointed out, it documents that in fiscal year 1992 through 1994, we took in almost $3 billion. We spent just a little over $1.25 billion in administration costs and sale preparation for timber. So there was a substantial profit made by the U.S. Government. It is dictated to use that profit several ways. First of all, $1.3 billion of it goes to the national forest fund. Almost $1 billion of it goes to the States where it is used for schools and government, State roads or county roads, given the case. $134 million goes in to maintain roads and trails for recreation. And then we have almost three-quarters of a billion dollars of it by law goes into reforest. Not all of that is reforesting areas that are cut. It may be reforesting areas that have burned, reforesting areas that have gone down with wind damage or disease. We also show that for other erosion, brush removal, other things, we have $1.34 million that go into the Forest Service use of maintaining the forest. The taxpayer would have to pay that out of his pocket if it was not coming from the sale of timber.

Mr. TAYLOR of North Carolina. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word. Mr. Chairman, again I would like to point out in the area of subsidy, if you order a table to Minnesota, the gentleman did, or if you bought it at an auction, and at that auction they said, all right, you are getting the table for $100 and we will ship it, or you can pay at $90 and we will pay the shipping cost of $10. It is the same thing when we are talking about giving credits for timber roads, there is no subsidy. We get the highest bid for the timber. If the credit was not given for the road, then the timber bid would be lower to include the road. The Forest Service wants the road built to their specifications, and that is why they give a credit for it. So there is no subsidy to the timber industry. It is a credit that is given when the road is built. Now, let me go on to the second thing where you can see by this chart the enormous drop in forest products. In fact, the Sierra Club, which the gentleman speaks out for many times, wants no cutting in our national forests. Now, if we cut, if we stop all cutting in our national forests, and we have almost done that because we are down to about 20 percent of our national forests now that can be considered for harvest, that is an antienvironmental position. I have not yet been able to persuade my friends on the right of that, all of them. But take this podium, it is made out of wood. We can make it out of wood or plastic or metal. If we make it out of the renewable resource of wood, it is much easier to make, takes less energy to make, it is easily recyclable. If we make it out of plastic, then we have to fight to get the oil out of the Middle East. We have to spill it two or three times on the way. It is more toxic in the manufacturing process and it is harder to recycle. That is saying nothing against plastic, because plastics are going to be needed. I am just saying if you start limiting your options, the same thing with metal, it takes 8 times more energy to produce a table with metal than it does with wood. It is much harder to recycle. Mr. Chairman, we are at a section of choices. If we follow the leadership of these folks who want all timber harvests stopped in the national forest and certainly if we do away with credits for roads, if we do away with any types of work with the Forest Service, because that is where a large portion of the timber is in the forest, which is different from the national parks part, then we are going to create far more environmental problems than we have solved in that manner. Second, I would just say one other thing. If you look at our chart to the left, today we get three-quarters of a billion dollars of our reforestation, which contributes enormously to forest health, from the timber funds, the $3 billion that we take in saving timber. Our States and local communities get almost $1 billion to operate their schools primarily and for their local uses that would have to be made up by the American taxpayer. We have $134 million in erosion control and other programs that would have to come out of the taxpayers' pocket, and many other parts of improvements in our forest that come from the $3 billion we take in from the timber sale program, plus we provide lumber for houses that would have to come from sensitive areas like the rain forest and other parts of the world. We are provided with one of the best managed forests in the world and we have the best technical science in the world. So if we stop harvesting the national forest, we are going to have a forest health problem and going to have an economic and environmental disaster because of the jobs lost and because of the damage we do to the environment, having to use substitute finite products rather than renewable products.

Mr. TAYLOR of North Carolina. I yield to the gentleman from Minnesota.

Mr. TAYLOR of North Carolina. Mr. Chairman, reclaiming my time, what you are saying is the roads are built to government specifications. They either give you the credit for building the roads, or your bid is going to be lower because you are only going to pay a certain amount for that product.

Mr. TAYLOR of North Carolina. Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. TAYLOR of North Carolina. Mr. Chairman, the gentleman made a statement that we take in $1 billion less than it costs in the Forest Service in our timber program. Is the gentleman familiar with the GAO report that the gentleman from Illinois [Mr. Yates] requested that said we take in roughly $3 billion, and it costs $1.25 billion to prepare the sale and administer the forest, which gives us a $2.7 billion profit? So, $1 billion goes to State governments, and $1 billion then goes for forest health, reforestation, erosion, and so forth.

Mr. TAYLOR of North Carolina. The cost is $1.25 billion according to GAO.

Mr. TAYLOR of North Carolina. Mr. Chairman, I want to commend the gentleman from Ohio [Mr. Regula], the staff of the committee, and the gentleman from Washington [Mr. Dicks], and the gentleman from Illinois [Mr. Yates], for the bill that has been put together. I think it is an outstanding bill, as has been said on the floor. So far, it does recognize many areas in forest health and it recognizes areas of park maintenance. It is probably the largest effort that has been made toward maintenance that we have had in a long time, and that is especially important in a time when there is so much pressure on reducing the budget. I would like, though, as a member of the committee and a sponsor of the timber salvage bill, to correct some misstatements. A lot of the organizations outside that have never understood this legislation, never really cared about forest health, have been trying to promote its demise. First of all, the 318 legislation that was put in by the Senate, as the gentleman from California [Mr. Fazio] indicated earlier, will expire September 30 of this year, so it is pretty much a moot question. As he mentioned a moment ago, the sales that people in that region felt were a problem, they have appealed. The court has spoken in this area and that is going to be pretty well handled, and there is no reason to address it on this floor at all. As it deals with salvage, to say that this language ought to be changed or we should have used this language is to fail to understand that the salvage language used in the timber salvage bill was the identical salvage language that has been used for years in the Forest Service's procedure in salvaging timber. It was only a few years ago that environmental organizations decided they needed to move another step forward and stop cutting in the national forest, as they have openly now said they want to do, and they put in a provision against salvage timber at the time. We simply removed that provision with the salvage amendment. The language is the same, that has never been contested over the years, as was used by the Forest Service. Second, to talk about its being used abusively, there is not one single case, and I challenge anyone to come with me, an it is hard to do on the floor, but I challenge anyone to come with me and prove there is a single case where that has been abused. And the final point is that green trees, when we are trying to wipe out disease and insects, for instance, with insects, the green tree is the host tree of the insect; it is a peripheral area just around the dead trees. If all we were cutting were the dead trees when we try to wipe out insects, we would never cut that out because the insect has already moved on to a living tree. So we have to come around to a peripheral area to get rid of the insects. And if we do not get rid of the insect, it will take the entire forest. And that was the reason for the salvage bill; it was for forest health. So I think the legislation has been misunderstood. We will address it more specifically in the debate, but it is a good piece of legislation that has worked well.

Mr. TAYLOR of North Carolina. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the requisite number of words. Mr. Chairman, the gentleman from Washington [Mr. Dicks] and I are often together in many areas, and I find that today we do oppose each other. I support the Riggs proposition that was put into the committee. First of all, we need to look at the Endangered Species Act itself, and we should not be doing that quite vigorously in committee. The act was passed some years ago with the intent of not killing endangered species, of not destroying, going in and physically destroying those species. We got to the regulations. It turned out to be, after the regulations were completed, not to disturb the habitat of that species. Now that is broad as the whole world. It is a long way from California to North Carolina, but in North Carolina we found the red cockaded woodpecker landing on a gentleman's land that by all the authorities, both regulators and nonregulators, was being managed in a businesslike, a professional and environmental way. There was 8,000 acres of land, and he won awards in doing it. The red cockaded woodpecker landed on it, built a nest, and in order to keep from disturbing the woodpeckers' habitat, they took a thousand acres of this land, set it aside. He could no longer harvest timber. He really could not do anything with it much. He went ahead and started harvesting the other 7,000 because he did not know when seven of the cousins of the red cockaded woodpecker might come over and take the rest of his land. Now we do not know, and we did not know at that time, whether or not the red cockaded woodpecker was endangered at that time simply because the man manages land, harvests it, grazes it and so forth, but that was not the question. It was determined by the bureaucracy that it would disturb the habitat. Now in the Pacific Northwest with the spotted owl we found that thousands of people were put out of work, we found that private property rights were taken in order to protect the owl. Some years ago I went out on a tour of the area. We found plenty of owls. We found finally that the owl probably was miscounted, that there were a lot more spotted owls than we thought. In fact they were quite more adaptable. We found them nesting in Kmart signs. So they had adjusted to their habitat pretty well. But that did not stop the fact that we destroyed tens of thousands of jobs in the Pacific Northwest and endangered private property rights. Now let us look at the marbled murrelet and see whether or not we are talking about really the destruction of the marbled murrelet by setting aside this 1 percent. I was on the Interior Committee in question; the scientists coming in. First of all, the marbled murrelet most of its life nests in the Aleutian Islands. There are no trees in the Aleutian Islands. So if it has to have trees, I asked the scientists, why, how did it get along in the Aleutians? They said it adapts. Well, precisely. Most of the land of the nesting areas is along the coast, is already protected, so the seafaring marbled murrelet has habitat to come in and nest in in the coast. The 1 percent that we are talking about may not even be necessary at all. In fact, if the 99 percent of public land that we now set aside is not enough to protect the marbled murrelet, why do we think 1 more percent of private property is absolutely essential to that at all, and there is no reason to say that we are going to destroy the marbled murrelet, even though its numbers may be decreasing, by defeating the Riggs position and taking this private property. The only thing we know for certain is that we are treading on private property rights each time someone puts forth one of the 5,000, one of the 5,000 endangered species, and there are 5,000 out there endangered or listing. We can shut down the entire United States any time we want to put any of those endangered species forward, as we have the spotted owl, or as we have done with the marbled murrelet. We have to get some sense back into our Endangered Species Act, and we must stop taking people's private property under the guise of protecting endangered spices when there is very little scientific evidence at all.

Mr. TAYLOR of North Carolina. I yield to the gentleman from Washington.

Mr. TAYLOR of North Carolina. Mr. Chairman, I appreciate the gentleman's courtesy. Is it really essential; in other words, is the marbled murrelet going to be destroyed if this 1 percent is not in? That would be the first question, and the second----

Mr. TAYLOR of North Carolina. If that is absolutely essential, then have we considered the taking and compensating? We are considering the taking. Then can we consider the compensation of the individuals, not just this individual, but the other ranchers and other private property owners?

Mr. TAYLOR of North Carolina. Mr. Chairman, to summarize I would say that to say that we are losing money by our timber harvest is not true. The homebuilders, the realtors, people who rely on the forest products to build homes know that it is not true and they know it is important for them to have a home. This vote that the gentleman from Minnesota [Mr. Vento] suggests is against public safety, as well as against the environment. Mr. Chairman, I yield to the gentleman from Minnesota.

Mr. TAYLOR of North Carolina. Is the gentleman talking about $50 million for credit or $50 million for timber roads?

Mr. TAYLOR of North Carolina

Mr. TAYLOR of North Carolina. Exactly. The Sierra Club came out recently with a vote two to one against any cutting on government forest lands altogether.

Mr. TAYLOR of North Carolina. Exactly. The implications of that is going to be severe, not only economically, because of the thousands of jobs and tens of thousands of jobs to be lost, but environmentally. Because as we pointed out again and again, we use wood products for many things. That table in front of you is an example. If we do not make it out of wood, we make it out of a finite product, usually plastic or metal. Both are finite and harsher on the environment. We also need the plastics for other uses. We need the renewable resource of wood. Throughout eastern America, the Appalachian hardwood in the Forest Service, I would say 50 percent of the timber, the Appalachian hardwoods that are going to be collected in the future, is going to come from Forest Service lands, supports the furniture industry that not only supplies homes across this Nation, but is a substantial export market for us, value added. The other factor I would like to point out in the total object we are talking about is all the folks who want to stop harvest in the forest do not tell us what is going to happen to replace all those forest products that the people need and a growing population needs, much less the jobs that will be abolished.

Mr. TAYLOR of North Carolina. Mr. Chairman, reclaiming my time, certainly in the area of salvage that is true, because the appeal process is getting so long now many companies will not give a high bid for government timber because the process is so lengthy.