USA: White House orders up more logging to combat wildfires
By Chris D'Angelo
With a government shutdown looming, President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Friday to boost logging and forest thinning on more than 4 million acres of federal lands to combat extreme wildfires.
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The order directs the Interior Department and the Department of Agriculture to identify ways to reduce “regulatory barriers” to better manage forests and get rid of hazardous fuels. It calls for “treating” 4.25 million federal acres — an area larger than Connecticut — to cut fuel loads. And it allows for a total 4.4 billion board feet of timber to be harvested from Forest Service- and Interior-managed lands in 2019 (board feet is a unit of measurement for the volume of lumber).
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The order also calls for addressing invasive species and working to mitigate flooding and erosion risks that result from wildland fires. And it requires the agencies’ secretaries to “identify salvage and log recovery options from lands damaged by fire during the 2017 and 2018 fire seasons, insects, or disease” by no later than March 31, 2019.
While the order lists a number of forest threats made worse by climate change ― drought, disease, insect infestations, invasive species ― it ignores climate change as a whole. That comes as little surprise, given the misinformation and climate change denialism that the administration rolled out in response to the fires in August.
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“All the fire ecologists are saying the same thing: You can’t log your way out of this situation,” [Denise Boggs, director of Conservation Congress] told the paper. “Logging in the back country is just a gift to the timber industry.”