Trump to Open Up 59 Million Acres of National Forest to Logging, Mining

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins on Monday announced the administration’s intention to rescind a quarter-century old rule prohibiting road construction, reconstruction, and timber harvest on large areas of the National Forest System.

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The Trump administration plans to rescind a Clinton-era rule that blocked logging on national forest lands, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced Monday.

Speaking at the Western Governors Association annual meeting, Rollins announced a rollback of what she described as the “overly restrictive” Roadless Rule. Introduced by the Clinton administration in 2001, the policy prohibits road construction, reconstruction, and timber harvest on nearly 59 million acres of the National Forest System.

It follows a March executive order and a memo issued by Rollins in April, which laid the groundwork for a major increase in industrial logging across federal forests.

More on the topic: Trump’s Push to Expand Logging Is A Major Threat to US Forests and Wildlife

Green groups have immediately hit back.

“The roadless rule has protected 58 million acres of our wildest national forest lands from clearcutting for more than a generation,” said Drew Caputo, Vice President of Litigation for Lands, Wildlife and Oceans at Earthjustice.

“The Trump administration now wants to throw these forest protections overboard so the timber industry can make huge money from unrestrained logging. These are lands that belong to all Americans, not the timber industry,” Caputo added, threatening leagl action against the Trump administration if the rollback goes ahead.

More than 1.6 million public comments were submitted in support of the rule’s implementation – more comments than any other rule in the nation’s history.

“Once again, the Trump administration is ignoring the voices of millions of Americans to pursue a corporate giveaway for his billionaire buddies,” said Alex Craven, Forest Campaign Manager at grassroots environmental organization Sierra Club.

The groups warned that timber and mining activities would pollute air and drinking water and strip away essential habitats for wildlife such as California condors, grizzly bears and wolves of the Yellowstone area, native salmon and trout in the Pacific Northwest, migratory songbirds of the Appalachian hardwoods.

Deforestation is also directly linked to higher emissions. When forests are cleared, the carbon stored in trees is released into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, the largest contributor to global warming.

Rollins justified the move as necessary to allow for better fire management in places such as Utah, Montana, and Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, where large areas of forest are protected under the Roadless Rule. This is despite research finding that most fires originate in close proximity to roads and settlements.

According to the Center for Biological Diversity, a US-based non-profit, decades of logging, fire suppression and livestock grazing have dried out forests across the country, increasing the risk of large, high-intensity fire.

Featured image: Wikimedia Commons.