An April 3 memo from United States Department of Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins designates 112,646,000 acres of national forest lands as an Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act “emergency situation.” The directive, which comprises 59 percent of all National Forest Service lands and includes most of the George Washington & Jefferson National Forests, allows for expanded logging in the designated areas.
Rollins claims the expanded logging “will support the durability, resilience, and resistance to fire, insects, and disease within forests and grasslands across the National Forest System.”
A followup memo from U.S. Forest Service Acting Associate Chief Christopher French calls for a 25 percent increase in timber volume available within four to five years.
This is the latest in a series of environmental moves by the Trump administration, following late January efforts to utilize the Clean Water Act to accelerate timelines for natural gas pipelines, like the controversial Mountain Valley Pipeline and its recently resurrected Southgate extension, and layoffs at Shenandoah National Park in February.
Opinion on the directives is split between the logging industry and environmentalists.
“If this administration were serious about the wildfire crisis, it wouldn’t chaotically fire wildfire prevention staff at the behest of Elon Musk. It wouldn’t slash departmental budgets and preparedness funds. It wouldn’t condition disaster aid to communities destroyed by wildfire. And it wouldn’t name an industry lobbyist to oversee hundreds of millions of acres of national forests,” said Anna Medema, Sierra Club associate director of legislative and administrative advocacy for forests and public lands, in an April 4 statement. “What Donald Trump and his cabinet are actually interested in is using any power at their disposal to hand over control of the public lands and national forests that belong to all of us to billionaires and logging companies.”
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