cross-posted from: https://lemmy.myserv.one/post/21841057
The Trump administration has said it will rescind Bill Clinton’s roadless rule, more than two decades after its introduction appeared to mark the end of the bitter battle between environmentalists and loggers over the future of America’s best remaining woodland.
The rule is “overly restrictive” and an “absurd obstacle” to development, according to Brooke Rollins, Trump’s secretary of agriculture, as she outlined its demise in June. The administration is in a hurry – an unusually short public comment period of 21 days for this rescission has just ended, following a Trump “emergency” order to swiftly fell trees across the US’s network of national forests, spanning 280 million acres.
“We are freeing up our forests so we are allowed to take down trees and make a lot of money,” Trump has said. “We have massive forests. We just aren’t allowed to use them because of the environmental lunatics who stopped us.”
My heart is so heavy there is no getting this back which is really the point isn’t it? The violence is the point.
The point is to make enough money for the owners of our society that they don’t complain about their basic freedoms being taken away.
The gestapo is coming for the trees now, so that they can deport the undocumented loraxes…
If the Amazon destruction enabled by the construction of roads in Brazil is any indication, then this is Double Plus Ungood™ for the remaining forests of North America: “We found that deforestation was much higher near roads and rivers than elsewhere in the Amazon; nearly 95% of all deforestation occurred within 5.5 km of roads or 1 km of rivers.”
Oh yeah no question. This is not about roads at all. There is no need for roads in these areas except for the purpose of clear cutting and stealing our publicly owned forests out from under us.
Note for anyone reading that this is from 2015 and may have changed a bit but is still worth investigating.
In the long term this is going to be amazing for the Canadian lumber industry.
Also we can go complain to the WTO they’re dumping and subsidizing, which is their complaint against Canada (we’re not, we just have different laws).
Terrible for the planet though.
I read about a Japanese method of harvesting trees without killing them, which yielded stronger straighter wood. I wish we’d adapt that and run healthy and fully renewable lumber farms. But capitalism doesn’t have the patience for that, so instead we clear cut then plant a monoculture of saplings with no ecosystem support as an offset.
There are many sustainable techniques for harvesting timber, but this kind of long-term thinking is not relevant to shareholders who only value quarterly profits.
