New USDA Order Opens National Forests To Logging

The Washington Post reports:

The Trump administration has removed environmental protections covering more than half of the land managed by the U.S. Forest Service as part of the president’s aim to significantly bolster the U.S. logging industry.

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said “heavy-handed federal policies” have prevented the United States from making use of its “abundance of timber resources that are more than adequate to meet our domestic timber production needs.”

The directive, which established an “Emergency Situation Determination,” comes a month after President Donald Trump signed an executive order seeking changes to forest management to increase timber production by 25 percent.

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