The MAGA plan to stop forest fires: Remove the forest | Project 2025 plans to increase commercial logging to fight wildfires. Ecologists and fire experts say this will make fires worse.
This is the most damaging part of Project 2025 IMO. No more experts working federal jobs: just yes men. Trump or whoever says, "Fuck the trees!" and they ask "How hard do you want it fucked?"
My dad has said since I was a kid that the secret to US political stability was the professional bureaucracy keeping everything running no matter who was in charge.
The really bad part is that once it's fucked it is exceptionally hard to un-fuck it. The people who leave find other work or retire and there is no private sector equivalent so you just lose all the expertise. This plan will cripple our country for a generation if it's allowed to come to fruition.
I feel like this is just the next level of what Reagan did to cripple the government. You make it so they can't do their job effectively then use the fact that it's not efficient anymore as the reason to get rid of it all.
The amount of destruction logging causes here in Oregon is sickening. Just came back from the coast and where hundreds of acres of beautiful trees stood is now a desolate scar.
I get that we have an addiction to wood products, but there has to be a better way. All you see are patches of land that look like Calvin's head when Hobbes cuts his hair, and monoculture "reforestation" efforts that ignore the amount of nutrition and fungal/floral/animal diversity that have been removed/destroyed. It just sucks. It reminds me of Costa Rica. I just hope we can choose, like much of Costa Rica, to try and embrace conservation and make an industry around that instead.
Can't speak to where that wood is going, but the addiction to profiting from the "green" wood pellets to fuel power plants worldwide is why a lot is being taken. And the ironic part is that wood pellet burning contributes more net carbon emissions into the air than the coal it replaced. But it's "renewable". Except it takes time to regrow trees, and we don't have time anymore.
Also from Oregon and unless I'm mistaken we're one of the better states at atleast trying to be more renewable about it. I thought I remember learning as a kid we had laws about having to plant multiple trees for every tree you chop down. Not sure if those are still around or how strong they are but I feel like we at least treat the environment better than a lot of other states.
Logging is needed as long as its done the right way. Clear cutting is rarely the right way. More thinning is needed in much of the federal lands in the west, or prescribed burning. If not, forest fires will continue to get worse.
It’s like conservatives heard the “too many trees close together” part about our wild fire problem, then proceeded to stop listening to anything else scientists had to say on the topic.
I can't help but think of Gulag Archipelago when Stalin had all the engineers arrested for "wrecking" because they could not make nonsensical orders lead to the desired output. In any industry.
Yup that's it. Make sure to build where the forest used to be as well with all that land you just freed up...nothing bad will happen because of this at all.
A certain amount of deforestation in the densest areas (combined with planting new forests in a more spread-out arrangement) is probably necessary for long-term wildfire minimization. Say you've got a huge fire raging in a dense forest. How do firefighters get there? Trucks can't get in. Gotta rely on fire helicopters, and those are much more expensive and fewer in number.
Don't just deforest in huge swaths. Cut paths big enough for firetruck traffic through the areas that don't already have it.
Prior to 1492 natives kept the forest healthy through both those methods. When Europeans arrived they reported being able to ride through the forest at a full gallop which would be impossible because of the undergrowth today.
It's a shame you're getting downvoted so hard, you're pretty much right as far as I can tell. The one thing I would add is that if you do controlled burns properly and cull older trees, all the other trees have a far smaller chance of catching fire. I'm not sure that density or side of the forest matters as long as the trees themselves are healthy.
Honestly you must be dumber than sticks to not understand what is being said here.
There are ways to cut trees to make forest fires spread slower, like for example a firebreak. It can slow firespread to critical areas or even stop it from advancing altogether. There is thought put into a firebreak. Not just reckless cutting.
Drumpf wants to cut "all the trees", because no trees is no forest, and no forest is no forest fires.... Some Idiocracy type thinking if you could even call it that.
The Forest Service should instead be focusing on addressing the precipitous
annual amassing of biomass in the national forests that drive the behavior of
wildfires. By thinning trees, removing live fuels and deadwood, and taking other
preventive steps, the Forest Service can help to minimize the consequences
of wildfires.
Increasing timber sales could also play an important role in the effort to change
the behavior of wildfire because there would be less biomass.
Nowhere in the document does it imply to cut all forests, but to thin them and clear out accumulated biomass, exactly as Biden has proposed.
This must be why the author only posted a link to P2025 and not the actual text, relying on the reader to assume they were being honest.