February 10, 2020 - Issue: Vol. 166, No. 27 — Daily Edition116th Congress (2019 - 2020) - 2nd Session
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TRIBUTE TO DR. WALLY COVINGTON; Congressional Record Vol. 166, No. 27
(Senate - February 10, 2020)
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[Pages S960-S961] From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov] TRIBUTE TO DR. WALLY COVINGTON Ms. McSALLY. Mr. President, I rise today to recognize one of the most influential and well-known forest ecologists in the Nation, Dr. Wally Covington of Flagstaff, AZ. Last month, Dr. Covington retired from his current position as regents' professor at the School of Forestry and the executive director of the Ecological Restoration Institute at Northern Arizona University. When we talk about the wildfire crisis afflicting the West, we frequently reference the need to thin our forests of the enormous number of small, dead, and dying trees that have fueled some of largest, deadliest, and most destructive mega fires ever seen in the United States. In my home State of Arizona, about one-quarter of our pine forests have been impacted by fire over the past two decades. In 2011, the largest wildfire in State history, the Wallow Fire, incinerated over a half million acres in a matter of weeks before finally burning out. And a nation mourned the loss of 19 brave wildland firefighters from Prescott, AZ, who gave their lives battling the Yarnell Hill Fire in 2013. These fires burn so hot and fast that they barrel through rural communities, insatiably consuming property in its path and, sometimes, human life too. We recognize that the fuel load is too high in many forests and that prescribed fires and fuel breaks alone are not enough to prevent mega- fires that crown atop forest canopies. Today, it is common sense that our fire-prone public lands need to be restored to their natural, fire-adapted state. It is difficult to imagine how this conventional wisdom shared across both sides of the aisle, and among the timber industry and environmental groups alike, was foreign, controversial, and, frankly, heretical only two decades ago. It was Dr. Covington's applied research in forest ecology and his tireless advocacy that showed us how reducing tree density through timber harvesting is not only beneficial, but also necessary if we want to reduce the threat of catastrophic wildfires. So when we talk about forest thinning, the country should know just how influential Dr. Wally Covington's contributions were to the practice of forest ecosystem restoration. Let me share a little bit of Dr. Covington's story with you. From a young age, Wally was exposed to the wonders of the great outdoors by his parents who first met and fell in love in Flagstaff. They instilled in him a profound appreciation for nature and a humbling perspective on humanity's impact on the land. At his father's urging, Wally studied the works of conservationist Aldo Leopold, who is regarded as the founder of the wilderness preservation movement and the philosophy of ``land ethics,'' which espouses the belief that man is not a conqueror of his environment, but a unique component of it. Later, Wally graduated from the University of North Texas with a degree in biology, and he planned to become a physician in pediatric oncology. However, the emotional toll of working with children with cancer left Wally disheartened. He departed medical school never to return. Still, that heart-wrenching experience taught Wally that he was a healer. Shaped by the burgeoning environmental movement of the 1970s, Wally answered another calling. He decided to pursue a master's in ecology from the University of New Mexico. It wasn't long before Wally's academic achievements led him to Yale University where he earned a doctorate in forestry in 1976. Dr. Covington was already an accomplished forest ecologist by the time he joined NAU. At Yale, he developed an innovative theory for predicting the carbon budgets of unharvested forests, a calculation known as ``Covington's curve'' that is still widely used in modern forestry. His next achievement, however, would transform how we view and manage our forestlands. For some time, Wally had been studying ponderosa pine trees, a type of evergreen species that dominates the landscape in the West. These iconic conifers span more than 27 million acres in the United States. Wally observed that our Nation's pine forests were out of balance, unhealthy, and highly susceptible to drought, insect infestation, and disease. A majority of the mega-fires or ``conflagrations'' impacting northern California, Montana, Arizona, and elsewhere were occurring in ponderosa pine forests. As a forest ecologist, Wally understood that fire plays a natural role in our forests. Historically, in North America, low intensity ground fire led to large, mature pine trees and forests that are naturally adapted to withstand fire. But modern wildfires in the West were now burning with such ferocious intensity that even the sturdiest of pine trees would literally boil to the point of exploding. Postfire conditions were no longer the regenerative force that ecologists had once studied. Soils were damaged, taking years to replenish their nutrients, and watersheds were more likely to experience long-term flooding and erosion. Wally once poignantly described the situation in an article he authored in the journal Nature in 2002: ``The dry forest ecosystems of the American West, especially those once dominated by open ponderosa pine forests, are in widespread collapse. We are now witnessing sudden leaps in aberrant ecosystem behavior long predicted by ecologists and conservation professionals. Trends over the past half-century show that the frequency, intensity and size of wildfires will increase--by orders of magnitude--the loss of biological diversity, property and human lives for many generations to come.'' Like any good healer, Dr. Covington worked tirelessly to diagnose the illness and devise a cure. As part of his research, Wally pored through historical records, old photographs, and land surveys dating back to the turn of the century. He listened to Native American Tribal members, the first inhabitants of our forests, who shared stories told and retold through the generations about elk and deer hunts in open canopied forests teeming with bountiful grasslands. Wally discovered that, in a very short time, about 50 years, the forest landscape of the West had substantially changed. He hypothesized, correctly, that man's presence had transformed our once fire-adapted, low-density forests into overstocked tinderboxes. Before there was a Forest Service, before westward expansion brought pioneers and homesteaders, the land, he estimated, supported around 50 to 100 pine trees per acre. In contrast, today's modern forests host roughly 300 percent more trees--sometimes as much as 1,000 trees per acre--a number far greater than the natural ecosystem can support. This meant that the West was overloaded with a dangerous amount of kindling fuel. To prove his theory, Wally ran experiments. Beginning in 1992, on a modest 10-acre parcel of Forest Service land in the Gus Pearson Natural Area, Wally established three test plots. The first plot was used as the control, its post-settlement state preserved as-is. The second plot was thinned of excess pine trees. On the third plot, the trees were thinned to simulate pre-settlement conditions and then subjected to prescribed fire, the kind of controlled burns routinely used by the Forest Service to clear our low-lying fuels from the forest floor. His test showed that fire behavior dramatically decreased on the plot that was thinned. Trees didn't suffer the same trauma found on the other two plots and in fact responded positively by producing increased resin, which meant increased resistance to bark beetle infestation. Also, the number of species and amount of native grasses and plants increased improving both forage and habitat quality. Wally had successfully conducted the first science-based forest restoration project in history. Dr. Covington took his findings to Congress, the Department of the Interior, the Forest Service, and the National Academy of Sciences. He met with Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt under the Clinton administration and, later, Secretary Gale Norton under the George W. Bush administration, to convince them to implement forest restoration treatments. In many of his meetings, he would echo the old adage, ``an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.'' They listened, and Congress listened, as did my Arizona predecessors in the Senate. In 2003, he worked with Senator Jon Kyl to enact legislation like the Health Forests Restoration Act and also established the congressionally chartered Southwest Ecological [[Page S961]] Restoration Institutes at NAU, Colorado State University, and New Mexico Highlands University, which assist the Forest Service in developing restoration projects across millions of acres of land. Today, the Forest Service and the Department of the Interior are working to mechanically thin millions of acres of forestlands across the West to make our forests more resilient to fire. It is a slow, expensive, and time-consuming prospect to reverse 50 years of forest mismanagement across a territory as vast as the United States, but the reward is worth it. In doing so, we are saving our forests, our homes, and human lives. I cannot overstate Dr. Covington's tremendous contribution to the field of forest ecology. Had it not been for Wally's work, his compassion for healing our unhealthy forests, and his drive to educate policymakers on the sound science behind forest restoration, I suspect our forests would be in far worse shape today. I am proud to recognize Dr. Covington, a fellow Arizonan. Our Nation owes Wally a debt of gratitude that we can never repay. ____________________
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