Government Announces Plan to Liquidate Millions of Acres of Forest

Now well into his second term, it's no secret that Donald Trump wields his emergency powers like Elon Musk uses slurs.

That is to say, he does it a lot. So far, Trump's declared national emergencies to classify drug smugglers as terrorists, the migrant crisis as an invasion, and the International Criminal Court's arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu as infringing "upon the sovereignty of the United States" — not to mention skirting around some annoying procedures which would have delayed his notorious trade tariffs, a move that plunged the global markets into chaos.

Now, Trump's pulling another emergency out of his hat, declaring huge rollbacks to regulation meant to protect the country's national forests.

Late last week, Trump's Secretary of Agriculture, Brooke Rollins, issued an "Emergency Situation Determination" affecting over 112 million acres, or 59 percent, of the National Forestry Service (NFS) land. The memo declares that the Trump administration will increase timber production by 25 percent, and contains long-term plans to evade regulations protecting national land.

The memo cites a national forest crisis due to "severe wildfires, insect and disease outbreaks, invasive species, and other stressors," which, hey — fair enough!

Unfortunately for the trees, Rollins' putative fix for all that is to "remove National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) processes, reduce implementation and contracting burdens, and to work directly with states, local government, and forest product producers to ensure that the Forest Service delivers a reliable and consistent supply of timber."

That NEPA bit is important. Since 1969, the NEPA statute has stood as a line of defense against corporations who would prefer to cut first and ask later, allowing citizens, activists, and researchers to weigh in on decisions affecting federal land. The Keystone XL pipeline, for example, was successfully shut down after a judge ruled that the US Department of State failed to share its findings on environmental impacts, violating NEPA.

If NEPA goes away, logging companies could begin chopping down federal forests without ever having to account for their actions, before or after. Along with the "25 percent" hike in logging, the memo is pretty vague about how this will tackle wildfire risk or insect outbreaks.

Considering Trump and Musk's drastic cuts to forestry workers in critical areas, in other words, and this emergency declaration reads less as a good-faith attempt to "save the trees" — and more like a generous handout to a logging industry that has a long history of decimating America's natural resources.

More on forests: Guy Who Urged Planting a Trillion Trees Begs People to Stop Planting So Many Trees