In emergency directives issued late last week, US Agriculture Minister Brock Rollins announced a plan of her ministry to expand registration and production of wood by 25 percent, and in this process, the dismantling of the ancient environmental review system, which is half -century in its length that prevented the federal government from putting the final touches on the main decisions related to national forest lands without a public vision.
Under the direction of Rollins and follow A previous executive order Signed by President Donald Trump, the American Forest Authority will implement the plan that appoints 67 million acres of national forest lands as a very high or high risk of forests, and the classification of another 79 million acres as a state of low forest health, and 34 million acres in the risk of a fire in the forests, and the disease. He told us that the advertisement includes about 59 percent of forest services lands.
Rollins did not mention any role played by climate change in escalating the danger or intensity of the wildfire, or how warming contributes to spreading plant diseases and expanding the scope of invasive species. Climate change has also been ignored in developing the Trump Administration’s proposed solution – to reduce forests.
“Health forests require work, and now we face a national emergency in the forests. We have an abundance of wood at a great risk of forest fires in our national forests,” He said Rollins in a press release. “I am proud to follow the bold leadership of President Trump by enabling forest managers to reduce restrictions and reduce fire risks, insects and disease so that we can strengthen the American wood industry and enrich our forests with the resources they need to flourish.”
Although it may seem obvious that cutting high -risk trees leads to a decrease in organic materials that can be burned, environmentalists say that management plans to increase wood outputs, simplify permits, and get rid of some environmental review operations, are likely to escalate only from the risk of forest fires and contribute to climate change.
Cutting the vast tract of trees releases huge amounts of Greenhouse gases In the atmosphere, warming exacerbates, which leads to the risk of a wildfire and causes fire faster and more hot. Although climate science in wood management is complicated, as techniques such as burns prescribed are widely effective in reducing areas exposed to fire at the celebration, the goal of the administration is to increase the registration imposed on liberation under the hypothesis of reducing the risk of shooting back, not the least of which is due to carbon costs to reduce forests.
A Map Accompanying the memorandum from the Ministry of Agriculture, or the US Department of Agriculture, indicates the periods of forests set by the agency according to the emergency naming. It seems that California, Colorado, Idahu, and Arizona have the largest space of affected forest lands. Parts of the south are also included around the Great Lakes, and New England. US Department of Agriculture Not How much acres will be affected for each state.
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Lisa del, a lecturer at the University of Colombia Climate School, who has searched for decades of forest fire policy. Similar ads were passed in multiple previous departments as a way to shorten Long time reviews Under the 1970 National Environmental Policy Law, or NEPA. However, what is new in this particular directive is the explicit intention of the US Department of Agriculture to “Remove“NEPA operations. Trump imposed multiple restrictions on the base during his first term, most of which later canceled the Biden administration. In his second term, the president sought to reveal how to implement overwhelming environmental legislation, and the decentralized smatitage how to control them and leave them to individual agencies to develop its own guidelines.
Dale said that these episodes are a “alarm bell” as the proposed cancellation of the NEPA operations in the US Department of Agriculture means that, in theory, a tree cutting company can come to a forest and extract from wood without the need to assess the environmental effects of its actions first – such as when the production of wood overcomes the habitats of the species threatened with refreshment.
“I am a little skeptical about the hypothesis of this memo,” said Del, who has long been supporting NEPA. “The idea that we will increase the production of wood by 25 percent and that this will be equivalent to the risk of wild fires? This is separation.”
As Del pointed out, most valuable woods are really located only in a few states, in difficult and very expensive areas. Moreover, she said: “None of these types of wood sales have a significant impact on the risk of wild fire.”
The US Department of Agriculture refused to comment on the story, but a spokesperson he sent Grute Public message Chris Fernish, Acting Head of Forest Service. In the message, FRINCHIRST directs all officers to “use innovative and effective methods” to meet the “minimal” requirements of NEPA, and later notice that the agency will soon issue a direction of “using NEPA in emergency situations” to simplify our permit process and simplify it.
The agency’s emergency declaration comes even as federal funding for food and farms continues, and has tried to reduce the same workforce that manages forest health and forest management.
This step will benefit industrial registration operations and create a negative seminar for counterattack. The decision called “a blessing for the registration industry and a catastrophe for our national forests.” Other invitation organizations, such as the non -profit center of biological diversity, pledged.Use each legal tool at our disposal To stop the Trump administration’s implementation of this matter. ”
Jack Algiere, Director of Agricultural Biology at the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, is a farm center and a non -profit farmer in New York. Emergency. “The thing with agriculture is that it works with living systems. It does not matter if you are in a forest or in the field of vegetables,” said Algiere, who was mentioned that there is no mention of a long -term implementation in the memo. “Not all of these places are the forests that have been abandoned. Many of them have already administrative plans, and perhaps this will disrupt this.”
Algiere also noticed how the language in the memo includes what many “correct words” consider – such as forest service signals that work to “supervise” lands with federal recognized tribes. However, he can only consider how to freeze the US Department of Agriculture at the same time and cut funding for food programs, diversity of diversity, stocks and climate from applications.
“This could have been written in several different ways,” he said. “It is not different from the rest of the US Department of Agriculture, there appears to be a few sides that are played.”