Trump administration moves to carve roads into 45 million acres of old-growth forests

Filed 1w ago · Via Courthouse News · The Buffoon Desk

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Farting Around

Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: Guilhem Vellut from Paris, France · CC BY 2.0 · via Wikimedia Commons

The Trump administration proposed Tuesday repealing the 2001 Roadless Rule, opening 44.7 million acres of national forest across 37 states and Puerto Rico to road construction and logging, including parts of Tongass, Shasta-Trinity, Pisgah and Allegheny national forests.

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins framed the move as restoring authority to local forest managers and reducing wildfire risk. Environmental groups countered with the Forest Service's own data showing nine of ten wildfires are human-caused and four times more likely near roads, and noted the existing rule already permits brush and fuel-ladder removal.

A February poll found 76% of Americans, across party lines, support keeping the rule intact. Idaho and Colorado forests are shielded by separate state laws.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

Reducing fire risk by adding the single most reliable ignition vector on the landscape is the kind of logic that only survives in a press conference, where nobody is allowed to ask a follow-up question. Note also the tell: the two states with their own protections carved out ahead of time, which is what it looks like when an agency knows exactly what it is about to do. Three-quarters of the country agreeing on something is supposed to be the rarest substance in American life, and here it is being treated as an obstacle to route around.

Source: Read the original at Courthouse News → Scored: Farting Around · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0

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