Trump Guts the Forest Service
By 
We like to think that much of the horrors of contemporary America is about Donald Trump. But again, Donald Trump is just a symptom. In fact, much of what he is doing has been the open goal of the Republican Party for over a quarter century. Karl Rove himself has said many times that taking America back to the 1890s is his goal. He even wrote a book about William McKinley. So when Trump guts the Forest Service in an attempt to hand back control over the forests to rapacious corporations (as if the USFS wasn’t in the pocket of timber companies for most of its history), it’s really more standard Republican Party ideology than Trump himself. And the basic position of the Republican Party is that Theodore Roosevelt was an error whose legacy must be erased.
Which doesn’t make it any better when Trump destroys the Forest Service.
The U.S. Forest Service is closing 57 of its 77 research facilities in 31 states under a reorganization plan announced this week, threatening science that looked at how wildfires, drought, pests and global warming are putting pressure on forests.
The agency plans to consolidate its research division into a centralized office in Fort Collins, Colo., and move field researchers to locations in nearby states. But employees said they feared the move would lead many scientists to leave instead. The reorganization will also move the agency’s headquarters to Salt Lake City from Washington, affecting 260 employees.
Many of the research facilities are at universities where Forest Service scientists have access to laboratories and computers or at experimental forests where scientists can monitor the effects of environmental changes over long periods of time. They also investigate logging techniques, endangered plant and animal species, and how forests grow back after devastating fires.
The agency is closing six research and development facilities in California, five in Mississippi, four in Michigan and three in Utah, among others.
This is also related to the desire to send these jobs out of Washington and into places the experts won’t move. They tried this in Trump 1, in Grand Junction. Now it’s Salt Lake. We will see.
The irony of all this is that those research stations are dedicated to growing timber more quickly and efficiently, limiting diseases and the like so that the timber industry can cut more timber. I guess that’s woke these days.