Trump To End Roadless Rule
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I have two basic theses about the Trump era. The first is that Donald Trump is the worst person in American history. The second is that Donald Trump is really just implementing the same Republican policy demands that conservatives have fought over for 50 years or more. Everything going on with the environment is very much the latter. Republicans always hated the Roadless Rule, to keep areas of our national forests that are presently roadless in a state of quasi-wilderness by not building more. So it’s not at all surprising that Trump is repealing the rule, implemented at the end of the Clinton administration.
The Trump administration Tuesday proposed a full repeal of a rule that for decades has prevented road-building and logging inside tens of millions of acres of near-pristine national forests, a move that environmental advocates fear could fragment already-threatened woodlands.
The Agriculture Department said that the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule, often called the “roadless rule,” was outdated and that greater flexibility was needed to combat the growing threat of wildfires on public land. Roads can provide greater access for firefighting crews and can serve as firebreaks.
“Our forests can’t afford another decade of inaction. Across the country, we’ve watched preventable conditions — overgrown stands, insect outbreaks and disease — turn healthy landscapes into tinderboxes,” Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said in the statement.
The total dishonesty that Rollins pushes here–this is nothing but the same timber industry propaganda from the 1980s.
Advocacy groups criticized the move as opening up vast areas of largely untouched forests to degradation. They argue the changes could lead to more fires as humans, who are the cause of 9 out of 10 fires, gain easier access to remote areas of national forest through new roadways.
“Opening our backcountry forests to more roads and development, and therefore more ignitions, is also not a wildfire solution, and never will be,” Josh Hicks, conservation campaigns director at the Wilderness Society, said in a statement.
And of course logging. So much logging. Even though 99% of our forests are already logged at least once. I’m sitting here writing this in Rockaway Beach, Oregon, overlooking mountains that are covered with recent clearcuts, imagining those forests with 250 foot trees that were all over the place 150 years ago, beautiful streams, abundant wildlife. But no, we need 100% of our forests turned into plantation forestry. Again, the only surprise is that George W. Bush didn’t do this. Rollins, Doug Burgum, everyone who is involved with environmental policy in the Trump administration is nothing more than Bog Standard Republican.