Senile Old Man Persists in His Obsession With Forest Management

The Trump administration couldn't possibly sink any lower.  The Orange Man's minions this week advanced a plan to open nearly 45 million acres of wilderness in national forests to road construction and logging, removing protections that had been in place for a quarter century.  The proposal by the U.S. Forest Service would repeal the 2001 “roadless rule,” enacted during the Clinton administration to preserve the wild nature of forest land. It comes as President Trump pressures the agency to increase logging and to thin forests to reduce wildfire risk.

The repeal would hand a major victory to Republican-led states and industry groups that have argued for years that the prohibitions have hindered economic development. More than a dozen lawsuits have unsuccessfully sought to strike down the rule. During his first term, Trump stripped protections from Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, the largest intact temperate rainforest in the world, only for the Biden administration to restore them in 2023. 

John Schoen, a retired wildlife ecologist who worked in the Tongass for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, co-authored a 2013 research paper finding that roughly half of the forest’s large old-growth trees had been logged last century. The remaining big trees provide critical habitat for brown bears, Sitka black-tailed deer, a bird of prey called the Northern Goshawk and other species, he added.

Convicted felon Donald Trump was widely ridiculed after suggesting during a visit to Paradise, the California community devastated by a 2018 wildfire, that the United States could curb such disasters by following Finland’s model, claiming that nation spends “a lot of time on raking and cleaning and doing things, and they don’t have any problem.”   One former Trump staffer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid retaliation, said forest policy has become “an obsession of his.”