•HCON 352 IH
are certain to escalate as fuels continue to accumulate
and more acres become high-risk’’;
Whereas the July 2001 General Accounting Office testimony
entitled ‘‘The National Fire Plan: Federal Agencies Are
Not Organized to Effectively and Efficiently Implement
the Plan’’ (GAO–01–1022T) before the United States
House of Representatives Subcommittee on Forests and
Forest Health reported that ‘‘The Federal Government’s
decades-old policy of suppressing all wildland fires, in-
cluding naturally occurring ones, have resulted in dan-
gerous accumulations of hazardous fuels on Federal
lands. As a result, conditions on 211,000,000 acres, or
almost one-third of all Federal lands, continue to deterio-
rate’’ and ‘‘[t]he list of at-risk communities ballooned to
over 22,000’’;
Whereas the escaped prescribed burn that created the Cerro
Grande Fire in May 2000, that consumed 48,000 acres
and 
destroyed 
400 
homes 
with 
losses 
exceeding
$1,000,000,000 in Los Alamos, New Mexico, and the es-
caped prescribed burn that created the Lowden Fire in
1999 that destroyed 23 homes in Lewiston, California,
highlight the unacceptable risks of using prescribed burn-
ing as the sole forest fuel reduction practice by Federal
land management agencies;
Whereas similar catastrophic wildfire resolutions were passed
by the California Legislature (AJR 69) and Western
Legislative Forestry Task Force (R00–1) in 2000 and
Oregon (HJM 22), Idaho (SJM 104) and Montana (HJ
22) in 2001;
Whereas the Western Governors Association’s ‘‘Collaborative
10-year Strategy for Reducing Wildland Fire Risks to
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Communities and the Environment’’ was signed in 2001;
and
Whereas in 2000, the United States Congress provided an
unprecedented $2,900,000,000 in funding for the United
States Departments of Agriculture and Interior wildfire
fire fighting agencies to prepare for future fire-suppres-
sion efforts and take proactive steps to reduce wildfire
risk on all Federal lands: Now, therefore, be it
Resolved by the House of Representatives (the Senate
concurring), That it is the sense of Congress that—
(1) in the interest of protecting the integrity
and posterity of United States forests and wildlands,
wildlife habitats, watersheds, air quality, human
health and safety, and private property, the Forest
Service and other Federal land management agen-
cies should—
(A) fully implement the Western Governors
Association’s ‘‘Collaborative 10-year Strategy
for Reducing Wildland Fire Risks to Commu-
nities and the Environment’’ to reduce the over-
abundance of forest fuels that place these re-
sources at high risk of catastrophic wildfire;
(B) use an appropriate mix of fire preven-
tion activities and management practices, in-
cluding forest restoration, thinning of at-risk
forest stands, grazing, selective tree removal,
and other measures to control insects and
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pathogens, removal of excessive ground fuels,
and small-scale prescribed burns;
(C) increase the role for private, local, and
State contracts for fuel reduction treatments on
Federal forest lands and adjoining private prop-
erties; and
(D) pursue more effective fire suppression
on Federal forest lands through increased fund-
ing of mutual aid agreements with professional
State and local public fire fighting agencies;
(2) in the interest of forest protection and pub-
lic safety, the Departments of Agriculture and the
Interior should immediately prepare for public re-
view a national prescribed fire strategy for public
lands that creates a process for evaluation of worst-
case scenarios for risk of escape and identifies alter-
natives that will achieve land management objectives
while minimizing the risk associated with prescribed
fire; and
(3) a national prescribed fire strategy for public
lands as described in paragraph (2) should be incor-
porated into any regulatory land use planning pro-
grams that propose the use of prescribed fire as a
management practice.
Æ