Cutting Threat of Giant Wildfires By Axing Harmful Clinton-Era Forest Policies

Dramatically reversing federal management of the nation’s natural resources, an over two-decades-old rule that has left millions of acres of U.S. Forest Service lands at high risk of catastrophic wildfires is being put to the torch by the Trump administration. 

Developed by the Clinton administration in the late 1990s, and going into effect in 2001, the Roadless Area Conservation Rule was said to protect over 58 million acres of Forest Service lands by banning logging and the construction of roads in what amounts to 30% of the National Forest System. 

But separating these vast lands from the human touch has severely undermined the health of both the forests and the people living in nearby communities. The prohibition on logging has allowed the forests to become overgrown, where not even diseased or dead trees can be removed or brush to be cleared by machinery, resulting in the emergence of giant tinder boxes ready to explode at the first lightning strike or casually thrown-away cigarette. Firefighters attempting to extinguish blazes that break out in roadless areas are hindered from doing their job due to the … lack of roads. 

“Instead of protecting forests,” Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins wrote of the Roadless Rule in The Desert News, “it has trapped them in a cycle of neglect and devastation. To date, we’ve seen more than 8 million acres of Roadless Areas burn. To put that into perspective, the average acreage lost to wildfire each year has more than doubled since 2001.”