Trump admin wants to open precious East Coast forests to logging & miniing!

[Woolly Bugger]

The Trump administration wants to open precious East Coast forests to logging and mining

The fight over the roadless rule has long focused on the West, but its repeal could fragment some of the last pristine forests in the eastern United States.

When most people think about national forests, they imagine vast Western landscapes: Alaska, the Rockies, the Pacific Northwest. But millions of acres of federal woodlands dot the eastern half of the country, too. These great swaths of vibrant ecosystems have long been free of roads, protected by a policy called, appropriately enough, the "roadless rule."

That may soon change.

Adopted in 2001 during the final days of the Clinton administration, the Roadless Area Conservation Rule, as it is formally known, grew out of a realization within the U.S. Forest Service that it had built more roads than it could afford to maintain. Many were crumbling into streams, fragmenting habitat, and degrading drinking water, alarming even agency scientists. The rule barred road construction and logging in nearly 60 million acres of undeveloped national forest in 39 states. In the eastern U.S., these areas provide rare pockets of ecological and natural relief in a densely developed region.

As the Trump administration moves to dismantle the policy and open those lands to logging and mining, the future of these forests — and the communities that rely on them — is in question.

The Department of Agriculture, under which the Forest Service sits, argues the roadless rule limits its ability to reduce wildfire risk, maintain access for firefighters, and promote forest health. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins has called the policy an "absurd obstruction" and "overly restrictive." She said its repeal would give the Forest Service greater flexibility to protect woodlands and support rural economies.

But conservationists argue the administration's position is unsupported by science and ignores the importance of these relatively pristine expanses of forest. The woodlands play an outsize role in sheltering wildlife, supporting recreation, and protecting drinking water supplies to millions of people, as well as storing carbon to help fight climate change. "Roadless areas are a finite resource," said Garrett Rose of the Natural Resources Defense Council. "They are our last best stretches of national forest land."

https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/the-trump-administration-wants-to-open-precious-east-coast-forests-to-logging-and-mining