Outcry as Trump plots more roads and logging in US forests: ‘You can almost hear the chainsaws’ | Virginia

IN 1999, Bill Clinton rose to one of the highest peaks in Virginia to announce that “the last and best unprotected wild land anywhere in our nation” would be protected by a new rule that prohibited roads, drilling and other disturbances in the most popular forests in America.

But today, this site of the national forest of George Washington, as well as other forests close to the United States, which represent 58 million acres, equivalent to the size of the United Kingdom, could soon see chainsaws swirling and the forest trucks rumble in the middle of a push of Donald Trump to shave these ecosystems for the Tinber.

The Trump administration said that it would cancel the Route without Route de Clinton, more than two decades after its introduction seemed to mark the end of the bitter battle between environmentalists and loggers on the future of the best remaining woods in America.

The rule is “too restrictive” and an “absurd obstacle” to development, according to Brooke Rollins, Secretary of Agriculture of Trump, as she underlined her disappearance in June. The administration is pressed – a period of unusually short public comments of 21 days for this termination has just ended, following an “emergency” order from Trump to quickly fall through the American network of national forests, covering 280 million acres.

The president has slapped the prices on wood imports, and the recent Bill of Republican spending requires that more wood come from American forests – an increase of 78% of the quantity of wood sold in national forests in the next nine years, a climb that could trigger a frenzy of new cuts.

“We release our forests, so we are allowed to eliminate trees and earn a lot of money,” said Trump. “We have massive forests. We simply have not been allowed to use them because of the environmental madmen that stopped us. ”

However, defenders of the Roadless rule argue that these areas should not be considered as simple wood sources, pointing their crucial ecological role in the protection and filtering of streams and rivers that provide drinking water to millions of Americans. Old -knit trees that have remained intact for centuries in these places also act as a home of hundreds of endangered species and are a large carbon store in the era of climate rupture.

The rule protects certain fragments of the forest, most of them in the United States, which are some of the most precious jewelry of nature found outside the national parks linked to the United States.

The largest area without road, in the Tongass National Forest in Alaska, is one of the forests richest in carbon in the world and contains more brown bears than all 48 lower states, attracted by an abundance of salmon. The national forest superior to Minnesota, for its part, contains miles of crystal clear waters for canoeing, as well as moose, lynx, singing birds and wolves.

Set such places to new roads and oil and gas drilling – although companies can always access it to cross the transmission of energy or pipelines – comes from a rethink in the 1980s and 1990s on the role of American national forests, which were insufficiently recorded.

Mike Dombeck, who was in charge of the US Forest Service when the Roadless rule was established, said that there was flourishing recognition of forest values ​​other than wood extraction – such as leisure, preserved views, protection of watersheds and tourist income.

“These are some of the best places to hunt and fish and recreate, but also the last refuge for many endangered species and the leading water for our drinking water,” he said. “There are also these other values, such as solitude, which are more difficult to measure.”

“It is such a confusing and chaotic approach that this administration adopts,” said Dombeck. “We lose this land quickly. If we do not keep it, we will lose it. ”

The forest service already oversees 370,000 miles of roads, enough to wrap the world 14 times, and all the new sculpted roads through the forests will also have to be funded by an agency that has been reduced by the budget and has lost around 15% of its staff, some 5,000 people, the Trump purge of federal labor.

“It costs the creation of these new roads and the forest service can barely maintain the roads it has,” said Dombeck. “In addition, the easiest to obtain wood has already disappeared. We will put new costly roads in areas that are difficult to reach, which will erode and then pollute water supply. It simply makes no sense.”

The rule without roads specifically targets the roads because they act as a multiplier of forest destruction, often generating other branching roads which cut connected habitat, as shown by the dismemberment of the fish track of the Amazon forest. These roads often bring new invasive species that can stifle native plants and animals.

The Trump administration and the forest operating industry claim that the ban on roads obstructs fire abolition activities, although vehicles and other human activities on roads can cause new forest fires in forests that become more prolonged due to the climate crisis. Since the 1990s, forest fires have been almost four times more likely to start in forests that have roads compared to road -free areas, according to a recent Wilderness Society analysis.

But the construction of unhindered roads should now return to American forests, with the exception of legal challenges. Ironically, the place where Clinton announced the Roadless rule – called a reddish button, a perch covered with graffiti on the Shenandoah mountain – could in the coming years a patchwork of land torn apart by the new journalization, rather than the cover of unstructed trees which are the inheritance of the rule.

Almost a quarter of the national forest of George Washington, which is co-managed with the adjacent Jefferson National Forest, is protected by the rule without rolling, and local defenders are concerned about its future. Pruche, the imposing oak and maple of old growth is in nearly 400,000 acres in a road without road which plunges from top to bottom of wooded peaks which can reach 4,000 feet, raid places formerly too difficult to access with horses and trucks, but which could now have trunks removed by helicopter.

“Many wise management practices will be overlooked in this cheeky rush for more wood,” said a long -term forest service manager in the national forest of George Washington who recently left and did not want to be appointed for fear of the punishment of the administration.

“The rule without a route was this truce between competing groups of user and it should not be struck so quickly. They really want to open it. You can almost hear the chainsaws.”

Road -free areas here contain critical upstream waters that feed a large reservoir from which the local Harrisonburg city is supplying alcohol consumption. In total, more than 2 million people in Virginia – and 60 million people in all of the United States – obtain their drinking water from sources flowing from protected road areas.

“We get more extreme storms and hurricanes, so having these road without roads here with intact roots to absorb water because it arrives quickly is crucial,” said Ellen Stuart-Haentjens, executive director of the Virginie Wilderness Committee.

“”Without the Roadless rule, we will have more intense flood events, the water quality would decrease, the species of fish and the trout would suffer and the tourist dollars for local cities will also be affected. Beyond that, there is the spiritual element, the enjoyment of going to hiking and research and not to think: “Oh, it’s just recorded.” “”

Although the Trump administration required an increase in logging, there are still obstacles in its own way. The recent period of public comments in abbreviation for the rollback showed that 99% of respondents were against its withdrawal, suggesting a broad decline in its plan. “Public support for the Roadless rule only increased in the quarter -century that it was in place,” said Aaron Weiss, deputy director of the Center for Westernities.

In addition, the wood industry, which currently obtains more than 90% of its product from private rather than federal land, can choose not to develop in all currently protected areas.

A spokesperson for the American Forest Resource Council, who represents the loggers, qualified the abolition of rules without road “a long expected correction of a federal policy to a size which has too often restricted the management of the necessary scientific forests”.

But he added that even if the forest service offers new areas for forest operations in road without road, new projects will not be immediate. “”Even if the Roadless rule is canceled, we think that it could take years that such a project is planned and approved, if that happens, “he said.

However, the revocation of the Route -Route rule reopens a chapter that many thought they had been closed for good, a bit like worries about the ozone layer or whale hunting. An apparently revolted age of the Industrial Forest Cup, where muscle extraction was primary, or only, thought had an improbable resurrection.

By trying to put the clock back, the Trump administration is moving years of scientific understanding of the role of forests, as he tried to do with our knowledge of the dangers, or otherwise, greenhouse gases, vaccines and drugs.

“If you show students today photos of clear areas of the forest, they will say:” Yeah, yes, it is in the past, we have resolved this “,” said Stuart-Haentjens. “Having this pop-up again now is just shocking.”