US forests: Trump proposes opening 44m acres to logging

President Donald Trump's administration proposed on August 18 to rescind a rule that protects 44 million acres of wild, undisturbed forest from road construction and logging.

The proposal would undo the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule, which restricted development in public forests and grasslands designated as inventoried roadless areas.

US Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said the existing rule had stopped the Forest Service from carrying out management work intended to reduce wildfire risks. She said overgrown stands, insect outbreaks and disease had turned some landscapes into fire risks.

An earlier draft of the proposed rule said it was intended to return decisions on road construction, road reconstruction and timber harvesting in inventoried roadless areas to local officials, alongside forest-level land management planning.

More than 95 percent of inventoried roadless areas are in 10 Western states: Alaska, Arizona, California, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington and Wyoming. The proposal does not apply to national forests in Colorado and Idaho because those states have separate roadless regulations.

Conservation groups opposed the proposal. Randi Spivak, public lands policy director at the Center for Biological Diversity, called it the largest removal of public lands protection in US history.

The group said roadless areas in the Northern Rockies support grizzly bears and lynx, and said the proposal would also harm salmon streams and old Sitka spruce in Alaska's Tongass National Forest. The Tongass was mentioned in the draft rule as directed by Trump's executive order titled “Unleashing Alaska's Extraordinary Resource Potential”.

A Susquehanna Polling and Research survey found that 77 percent of likely voters considered conserving national forests and other roadless lands for current and future generations paramount, while 11 percent supported opening more land for timber harvesting and mining.

More than 370,000 miles of roads were built through national forests before the 2001 rule, with a maintenance backlog of billions of dollars. The Center for Biological Diversity said most wildfires are human-caused and occur near roads, and cited a study in Fire Ecology that found wildfire ignition was nearly four times more likely within 50 metres of roads than in roadless areas.