Noted Forest Management Expert Donald Trump Wants to Log World's Largest Intact Temperate Rainforest
Tom McKay
Yesterday 11:50PM
•
A boat passes through the Tongass Narrows in Ketchikan, Alaska in 2001.
Photo: Seanna O’Sullivan (AP)
Donald Trump’s administration has turned its all-consuming maw to Alaska’s 16.7-million-acre Tongass National Forest, per a Tuesday report in the Washington Post citing three sources briefed on a plan to exempt the forest from logging restrictions imposed in 2001.
As the Post noted, Tongass National Forest is the world’s largest intact temperate rainforest, and the exemptions could open up this relatively unscathed ecosystem to renewed logging, energy, and mining projects. Particularly headache inducing is that Trump has reportedly taken a “personal interest” in the topic of forest management, with one aide telling the Post that forest policy has become “an obsession of his.”
Virtually every time the president has opined on the subject, from claiming that Finland prevents wildfires by “raking” forests to wild claims that California is letting water flow into the Pacific instead of using it to put out blazes, he has displayed a typically profound ignorance. It’s beyond clear that Trump does not understand the subject of “forest management” at all and essentially believes it to be a synonym for logging.
The Tongass is a huge stretch of southeastern Alaska filled with old-growth trees that constitutes the Forest Service’s single largest holding. According to the Post, the decision in question involves proposed revisions to rules implemented in 2001 under the Clinton administration, which prohibited logging in more than half of the Tongass as part of a broader “roadless rule” barring “the construction of roads in 58.5 million acres of undeveloped national forest across the country.”
More:
https://earther.gizmodo.com/noted-forest-management-expert-donald-trump-wants-to-lo-1837639261