Trump and Congress are Working Together to Fix Our Forests -- And they Don't Need Your Help!

 

Above: A clearcut on private land in Oregon

The Trump crime syndicate recently declared an emergency situation on America’sNational Forest system lands.

They do love their emergencies, which they use as excuses to break any laws or conventions they choose. In this case, the faux emergency stems from “severe wildfires, insect and disease outbreaks, invasive species, and other stressors.”

All of these are legitimate concerns. But the Trump gang’s edict addresses none of them. It simply prescribes a lot of deforestation. Specifically, it, opens for logging about 60 percent of the national forest lands. In at least two states – Washington and California- - it opens every single acre of forest service land to logging.

And this will not be a careful removal of a few trees. The most profitable way to “harvest” forests out west is to clearcut them. This means -- as the term implies -- simply identifying a large piece of forest, then mowing down every tree within it.

This, of course, is also the most destructive method of tree cutting. It makes forests more vulnerable to fire and makes them less useful for flood control. It fragments wildlife habitats. And it reduces the ability of forests to offset climate change. (Trees sequester carbon and the most mature trees sequester the most carbon.)

It’s true that clearcuts are often re-planted, and the timber companies love to praise themselves for this. But they prefer to plant only seeds of commercially useful species, thus creating forests that are more like monocultures than biodiverse systems.

In recent decades, size limits have been placed on clearcuts on federal lands. Forty-acre cuts with a little buffer between them is a fairly standard guideline. But, as Trump officials have shown in other matters, they disdain regulations that restrict profitability. Very little, if any, enforcement of clearcut size limits can now be expected.

And, when left to their own devices, large corporate timber companies are known to denude enormous sections of forest. Recently, three companies created a clearcut measuring 42 square miles on a privately owned plot in Oregon. That is 700 times (700 times!) the oft-recommended 40 acres.

Congress Gets on Board.

You might suppose some Democrats in congress would put up at least a show of  resistance to this destruction But instead, two Democratic Senators from Oregon have introduced a bill that would make it easier to give away the forests to large multinational paper companies.

The bill, as usual, sounds pleasantly benign. It’s titled the Fix Our Forests Act, and according to a statement released by Senator Alex Padilla of California:

It would create a wildfire intelligence center to centralize federal management, require assessments of fireshed areas and streamline how communities reduce their wildfire risk. It also would ramp up research into wildfire mitigation technologies and change some forestation treatments.

But this is, in fact, a kind of carefully crafted sheep dip. For the bill, in the words of a watchdog group called Oregon Wild:

would allow logging on federal lands without scientific review and community input. The bill truncates ESA consultation requirements to protect threatened and endangered species and limits the right of citizens to judicial review, effectively barring communities from bringing lawsuits to hold federal agencies accountable.  

 

 An official summary of the bill by the Congressional Research Service puts it this way (the emphases are mine):

.. the bill expedites the review of certain forest management projects under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) of 1969 and exempts certain activities from NEPA review.. It also limits consultation requirements concerning threatened and endangered species under the Forest and Rangeland Renewable Resources Planning Act of 1974 and the Federal Land Management and Policy Act of 1976. Finally, it limits litigation involving fireshed management projects and limits remedies that courts may provide.

 

In other words, it grants permission – as if they needed it -- to the Trump group to ignore virtually any environmental guidelines relating to chopping down trees.

Even the editors at The Hill – no radical webpage by any means -- saw through this sham. The headline for a recent article there sums it all up nicely:

The misleadingly named ‘Fix Our Forests Act’ would do anything but.