Thread 513346336

What are the implications of Trump rescinding the roadless rule in our national forests?

For those who don’t know, the roadless rule was a rule that prevented development of any kind on 59 million acres of forest service land. Most of these areas have never been logged (given that there isn’t logging infrastructure in place ie roadless).
Roadless areas are a different distinction than national parks or designated wilderness areas, which are safe (for now), but these 59 million acres of identified, but not formally-designated, wilderness roadless areas often served as de facto buffers around the already formally protected park and wilderness zones.
Given that these areas have never been logged on or developed, they hold the nation’s last bastions of old growth forest and virgin wilderness outside of the formally protected areas.

What will be the implications of this once trump and his corporate lackeys start building roads, lumber mills and mines in our pristine wilderness?

>hurdur fearmongering
The roadless rule was rescinded days after mike lee’s land sale bill was shot down. They’re still going to develop the lands, and sell them later on.

Here you can see a map of wilderness areas overlayed with maps of Inventoried roadless areas. As you can see, they surround formal wilderness areas, expanding them greatly outside of just the formally protected zones, and effectively nearly double the total acreage of wild.

Obviously we all know the implications of clear cut logging and strip mining, which are the main economic incentives to rescind the roadless rule.
But along with the obvious habitat destruction of these activities, the simple existence of roads themselves in a natural environment disrupt habitats, segment wilderness, allow invasive species to spread more easily, disrupt watershed patterns and destroy the integrity of the soil, causing landslides.

The mere existence of a road disqualifies an area to be considered as wilderness.

Once an old growth forest is cut down, it takes hundreds of years for it to regenerate into a functioning ecosystem again. Once we build roads through these pristine lands and cut the trees down for profit, they’re gone forever. Currently less than 5% of the original old growth in the US still stands, and trump is assaulting it.

It is even worse that our lumber industry has been dying for decades, we can’t outcompete Russia or Canada, and there simply aren’t enough mills anymore to process our logs. Currently over half of our harvested lumber is exported. We are stripping our country’s natural beauty to make a quick buck off of china and Japan.
Harvesting a 1000 year old oldgrowth tree just to sell it to china so they can turn it to woodchips is a fucking crime against the planet.

>hur dur they grow back bro
If you haven’t been, I encourage you to visit some of the old growth stands in California and Washington, where the largest and oldest (and pretty much the only in the lower 48) tracts of ancient temperate rainforest still stand. It is a spiritual experience, walking amongst ancient giants that are older than Jesus Christ. The redwoods and the hoh rainforest are some of my favorite places in the entire world. The shitty Douglas fir tree plantations that have replaced 95% of it and dominate the landscape now are not the same. It’s equivalent to paving over the Everglades to build condos for boomers and planting a few palm trees in the yard.
Trump is assaulting this biome, the largest temperate rainforest in the world, full of millions of acres of old growth, in Tongass, Alaska, with this EO.

>>513346336 (OP)
>>513346584
>>513346913
>>513347234
It sucks. If we had become Nazis earlier maybe it wouldn't have gotten to this point.

>>513347946
>the first major nature protection laws were in Nazi germany
?
Otherwise interesting read

Yeah. That really really really sucks. Makes me furious. These are not things that can be replaced. Maybe they democrats can run someone who's not an insane tranny fixated warmongering fag lover who wants to replace the native population and bleed the working class for the benefit of champagne socialists all while they sell the land out from under us to other sorts of forgien investors pricing people out of homes and desperately trying to mantain the status quo as if producing nothing is a viable long term strategy while we are incresingly on the economic backfoot against china so people like trump and his neocon cronies aren't still the better option? The bar is real fucking low here.