Scientists Are Sounding the Alarm Over Trump’s ‘Emergency’ Forest Logging Order

The Trump administration’s aggressive efforts to open up swathes of the American wilderness to commercial logging are raising everything from eyebrows to serious concerns among scientists and current and former federal land managers. A month after President Trump signed two executive orders regarding the national security concerns of timber and lumber exports and expansion of American timber production, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins tripled down. The secretary published a memo creating an “emergency situation determination” for over 112,646,000 acres (455,862 square kilometers) of national forest. There are 154 national forests in the United States, comprising about 188.3 million acres (762,000 sq. km), so the affected areas are about 60% of all the country’s national forest lands. Framed as a way of addressing a crisis of wildfires, the memo “relies heavily on references to ‘domestic timber production’ and ‘heavy-handed federal policies’ like environmental safeguards,” as no ... Read full article.