President Donald Trump’s administration on Tuesday proposed a rule change that would open 44 million acres of wild, undisturbed forest for road construction and logging.
The proposal would rescind the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule, enacted in the final days of the Clinton administration, which barred development across vast areas of public forests and grasslands designated as “inventoried roadless areas.
In a statement announcing the move, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said the rule had prevented the Forest Service from carrying out vital management work that would curb wildfires. “Across the country, we’ve watched preventable conditions overgrown stands, insect outbreaks and disease turn healthy landscapes into tinderboxes,” she said.
Trump’s administration meanwhile is hostile towards any action to curb climate change, which is making wildfires more frequent and severe by driving hotter and drier conditions.
“Trump is pushing for the largest evisceration of public lands protection in American history and against what Americans want,” said Randi Spivak, public lands policy director at the Center for Biological Diversity . The nonprofit described roadless areas in the Northern Rockies as “lifelines” for grizzly bears and lynx, adding that the proposal would also be disastrous for salmon streams and centuries-old Sitka spruce in the Tongass, the nation’s largest forest located in Alaska.
