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.”
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.