Goodbye 45 million acres of forest

Written by

Ophelia Benson

in

When in doubt, destroy everything.

The Trump administration on Tuesday advanced a plan to open nearly 45 million acres of wilderness in national forests to road construction and logging, removing protections that had been in place for a quarter century.

The proposal by the U.S. Forest Service would repeal the 2001 “roadless rule,” enacted during the Clinton administration to preserve the wild nature of forest land. It comes as President Trump pressures the agency to increase logging and to thin forests to reduce wildfire risk.

If thinning forests reduces wildfire risk then that’s a reason to do it. Increasing logging until all the logs are gone, not so much.

The repeal would hand a major victory to Republican-led states and industry groups that have argued for years that the prohibitions have hindered economic development. More than a dozen lawsuits have unsuccessfully sought to strike down the rule.

Well you see economic development isn’t the only good. It’s one of them for sure, and a major one, but still there are others. Forests are a good. Forests that have not been denuded of most of their trees are a good. They are pollution sinks, just for one thing.

During his first term, Mr. Trump stripped protections from Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, the largest intact temperate rainforest in the world, only for the Biden administration to restore them in 2023.

This time, the Forest Service is eliminating protections for the nine million undeveloped acres within the Tongass, as well as millions more acres of pristine wilderness across the rest of the United States.

When in doubt, destroy. When in doubt use up something that can’t be replaced. When in doubt, create a desert and call it development.

Environmentalists said the plan would destroy untouched landscapes, including crucial habitats for migratory species and headwaters for major municipal water supplies. Multiple advocacy groups are expected to sue to block the repeal.

“By ripping protections from some of our oldest intact forests, the Trump administration is endangering the drinking water supplies of tens of millions and threatening wildlife habitats and recreation opportunities in almost every state,” said Drew McConville, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a liberal research organization.

Just buy bottled water.

Comments

9 responses to “Goodbye 45 million acres of forest”

  1. iknklast Avatar
    iknklast

    It’s the same thinking that considers any drop of water that reaches the ocean as wasted.

    Use it all up…we’ll have it all, and our descendants won’t have anything. Why should we care? We won’t live to see them have nothing, right?

    I tried to teach Environmental Science in a state that believed the only good environment was one that yielded up all its resources and grew more and more and more. Too few people realize you can’t do that indefinitely. There must be something there to grow more from…and in a world where we have so poor an understanding of the food webs and interlocking natural systems, we will some day extinct a species we rely on without realizing it existed, or that we rely on it.

  2. Omar Avatar
    Omar

    iknklast:

    It’s the same thinking that considers any drop of water that reaches the ocean as wasted.

    Here in Australia, we all think that way; because it is true. Bar some cataclysmic event far bigger than that trivial little asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs circa 66 million years ago, the oceans will always be there, and will never go dry. But the same is not true for the majority of lakes and rivers in Australia, and all but a few have done so in recorded history.

    One engineer employed by the giant Snowy Mountains Authority put it to me thus a few years back: “A drop of water either goes over the spillway when the dam is full, for a short run down to the ocean, or it goes through the reticulation system and reaches the ocean via that.” Or words to that effect.

    Which brings me to the second question: How well forested is Mar-A-Lago, where Trump has a hangout? Forest vandals are generally ardent conservationists of their own immediate environment, in my experience. And slum landlords build slums for other people to live in, but mansions for themselves.

  3. Francis Boyle Avatar
    Francis Boyle

    Omar, I think Trumps idea of nature is lawn as far as the eye can see.

  4. iknklast Avatar
    iknklast

    Omar, engineers have very little knowledge of ecology, biology, or earth science. The oceans are crucial for control of our climate, and for the vast amount of life they support. The oceans won’ t likely dry up but all the changes can lead to serious consequences not just there, but in far distant parts of the planet.

    I suspect those engineers you know are part of the problem, not the solution. Engineering ‘fixes’ are a large part of the reason the Colorado River dries up for portions of the year.

  5. Omar Avatar
    Omar

    iknklast:

    The oceans won’ t likely dry up but all the changes can lead to serious consequences not just there, but in far distant parts of the planet.

    Very true. The only way the oceans IMHO could ever dry up would be for there to be such an increase in solar radiation and/or overload of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere to be sufficient to turn all of them to steam, or at least, to water vapour. As steam, they would end most life on Earth save the bacteria that live 1 km or so down in the crustal rock; between the crystals of the silicates and other minerals making it up. As water vapour, there would be cloud in the atmosphere sufficient to block out the Sun completely, with the only light being from lightning flashes consequent upon the constant thunderstorms, the like of which neither we nor any other member of Kingdom Animalia have ever seen before. But in that or some similar way, the whole Earth system would be self-correcting.

    However, neither you nor I nor anybody else can take a step outside our front door, or from one room to another inside, nor inhale or exhale a single breath without altering that atmosphere-hydrosphere-biosphere-lithosphere complex we call the Earth in some way; for better or worse depending on where we each individually fit into the whole setup.

    Or as some would say, the whole schemozzle.

  6. Jim Baerg Avatar
    Jim Baerg

    When rain water falls on land and flow into rivers it dissolves small amounts of salt from the rock. So if you irrigate land that salt will accumulate in the soil *unless* you arrange for some of that water to drain to the sea instead of it all evaporating, directly or via the leave of the plants.

    So there is a very practical reason let lots of river water drain into the sea.

  7. iknklast Avatar
    iknklast

    Omar, as a water scientist who also has a background working in air quality, your comment feels to me a great deal like mansplaining. I actually know all that. It does not change my comment. It is essential to let water run to the ocean.

  8. Omar Avatar
    Omar

    Jim:

    So if you irrigate land that salt will accumulate in the soil *unless* you arrange for some of that water to drain to the sea….

    Such is inevitable anyway here in Australia, where droughts commonly end in massive floods, in both coastal and inland rivers.

    My own mother was born at Lightning Ridge, in western NSW, in what is commonly referred to as ‘the Far West,’ and she would often recite the classic poem ‘My Country’ by Dorothea Mackellar, whom she also knew personally, and which was written from the heart by a homesick girl sent to England by her wealthy western NSW grazing family to complete her education in some toffee-nosed upper-class school. It includes the lines: “I love a sunburnt country, / A land of sweeping plains, / Of ragged mountain ranges, / Of droughts and flooding rains….” Mum was also a keen supporter of the huge Snowy Mountains Scheme, which began shortly after WW2, and which was a hydroelectric project marketed as an irrigation one. She was delighted to meet a young engineer friend of mine whose first job on graduation was working on it. But they soon fell to arguing about the practicalities of irrigating inland Australia, and finished up agreeing to disagree. (I stayed right out of it.)

    My own dear wife grew up on a dairy farm situated on land near Kempsey, in coastal NSW, where with monotonous regularity, they would watch floods taking houses, farm buildings, and whole herds of cattle away, to finish up in the nearby Pacific Ocean.

    https://www.dorotheamackellar.com.au/my-country/

  9. Omar Avatar
    Omar

    iknklast:

    … your comment feels to me a great deal like mansplaining.

    The essence of which as far as I can gather from Google is condescension. My comment began with the two-word statement re yours of “Very true.” But, like all comments on this site and elsewhere on the net, was available to any and all readers. And as I have always treated you with great respect, I am damned if I can see how it was condescending.

    But if you took it that way, I apologise.

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