Let People Use America’s National Forests
On August 18 the Trump administration shocked some ostensible environmentalists by announcing that it planned to open almost 45 million acres in the nation’s national forests to logging. The action would reverse a 25-year-old Clinton administration “roadless rule” that was aimed at preserving the “wild” nature of forest land. Having previously stripped such prohibitions from Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, only to see the Biden administration restore them in 2023, the Forest Service now plans to eliminate “protections” for nine million acres in the Tongass, as well as millions in other forest areas.
The move is a response to demands from Western state governments and logging-industry groups who complain that the ban on road construction and logging has hindered economic development. But not surprisingly, numerous ostensible environmental spokesmen have objected to the move. According to the left-leaning Center for American Progress, for instance, removing protections from some of the nation’s “oldest intact forests” will “endange[r] the drinking supplies of tens of millions and threate[n] wildlife habits and recreation opportunities in almost every state.” And even “ecologists” quoted by the New York Times who “agree that the government needs to improve the ways it manages forest land … do not agree that cutting down pristine forests to build more roads is the best way to do it.” In particular, they warn that “roads could actually increase the threat of wildfires” to the forests, “partly because roads bring people.”
It is revealing that the core reason offered by today’s radical environmentalists to roadbuilding in the national forests is the influx of people they would bring.
What a laugh: the nation’s forests should be managed in a way that minimizes their use by people! The National Forest Service’s current official motto is “Caring for the Land and Serving People.” In the past, I recall it advertising the forests as a “land of many uses” — including various forms of recreation (hiking, hunting, swimming) as well as logging. (In allowing logging, the forests were distinct from national parks, sites of special scenic interest, where it has long been banned.) Now, we are told, increasing the supply of timber — and even making the forests more accessible for other purposes — would violate the reason for their existence. (Just who will get to enjoy the promised “recreation opportunities” in the absence of roads to get there?)
Even though the Trump administration has pointed out that road building will make it easier for firefighters to reach forest fires, Democratic Senator Martin Heinrich (NM) casually responds, “We have smoke jumpers” for that purpose — as if access were all that easy even for them in the absence of roads! And according to the Times, “Democrats from Western states said they believed wildfire arguments were designed to hide the administration’s real goal: enabling more logging.”
But there is nothing “hidden” about that goal, nor should there be. Increasing the supply of lumber will bring down the cost of home-building — this at a time when many are complaining of an “affordability crisis” in housing. Harvesting that supply will benefit not only lumber companies and homebuilders, but ordinary folks who want to live in homes. It just happens that increasing the land open to roads will also provide other benefits: not only making it easier for firefighters to combat fires, and for prescribed burns to be used to try to limit them, but also opening up land for recreational purposes that can currently be enjoyed only by well-equipped backpackers. And in Alaska, a spokesman for the Pacific Legal Foundation, a libertarian public-interest law firm, points out that the absence of roads has led to restrictions around the Tongass “that have made it difficult for surrounding communities to connect to electrical grids.”
In a parade of horrors advertised in the Times story, opponents to expanded logging make it seem that loggers want to simply destroy forests, rather than finding it in their interest to plant new trees to replace older ones that they harvest. They also warn that the Trump plan will destroy “habitats for migratory species and headwaters for municipal water supplies” — as if most acreage serving as such habitats will not still be available, or as if regulations cannot be enacted to preserve the quality of water sources.
It is revealing that the core reason offered by today’s radical environmentalists to roadbuilding in the national forests is the influx of people they would bring. (This is reminiscent of the enactment in Spain several years ago giving rights of legal representation to nonhuman animal and vegetable life — as if all were to be put on an equal footing by our government!)
Several decades ago when I was visiting national parks in the Northwest with my family, we wound up dining at an unpretentious, old-fashioned restaurant-bar patronized by loggers in the midst of national forest land. This was at a time when restrictions on logging were being imposed in the name of preserving the spotted owl — a species that was supposedly endangered thanks to excessive logging which was destroying its habitat. (In fact, it later turned out that the cause was growing dominance by another owl species.) But we all recall the sign that had been posted over the bar: “No wood or paper products used here. Wipe your butt on a spotted owl!”
That, it seems to me, was an appropriate sort of putdown for pampered liberals who are embarrassed by the greedy utilitarianism of their fellow citizens.
READ MORE from David Lewis Schaefer:
The New York Times and the Credulity Problem
A False Choice: ‘Wars of Necessity’ v. ‘Wars of Choice’