Shawnee National Forest and Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie are both National Forest properties here in Illinois, but they and all National Forests are under attack.
Earlier this month, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins issued an emergency order that opened 59% of U.S. National Forests to logging and some to mineral mining. The emergency, the memo states, is due to wildfire, disease, and invasive species that are “compounded by too little active management.” Unstated in the memo is that the reason for too little active management is the firing of 3,400 Forest Service employees back in mid-February, with plans to fire 7,000 more soon.
The emergency order makes laws like the Endangered Species Act, Tribal Consultations, and the Clean Water Act, all easier to subvert in favor of big timber and mining interests. The best science shows logging and mining our national forests will not help with wildfire, disease, or invasive species but will instead exacerbate each of these issues. What logging and mining our national lands will do is enrich executives like Secretary Rollins’ husband, who is the President of two oil and gas companies that stand to benefit from such orders.
This is but one example of how the Trump administration manufactures emergencies that then allow it to raze our federal lands. The winners are business elites, while we the people lose our critical natural resources.
I’m Holly Jones, and that’s my perspective.
