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.”
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.