This once venerable cartoon spokesman for the Forest Service had only one piece of advice: “Only you can prevent wildfires.” Imagine his shock over President Donald Trump’s interpretation: “The way I can prevent forest fires is to permit more logging.” Beneath this smoke screen is the larger Trump administration plan to replace natural conservation as a national priority with exploitation whenever and wherever possible. The administration wants to increase logging by 25 percent. It is attempting to repeal the “roadless rule” that kept logging out of 45 million acres of pristine forest.
It has rescinded environmental regulations and replaced them with watered-down fast-track rules for loggers and miners. It has rescinded the Public Lands Rule that placed conservation on an equal footing with commercial development on public property. The Trump administration has justified some of its mania for exploitation by claiming that logging forests prevents them from burning.
Of course, a forest that isn’t there can’t burn, but the idea that more logging creates more vital fire breaks is also questionable. A recent analysis studying this question agrees with Smokey: careless people start forest fires. One thing that seems lost in the debate over what Trump can do and can’t do with public land deserves special attention: the legal distinctions.
The federal government owns millions of acres of raw land. The Bureau of Land Management oversees 245 million acres of land which receives limited—and now decreasing—protection. But there are multiple types of specially protected federal land too—most important among them are the 52 million acres that are congressionally dedicated as “national parks.” These lands are no presidential plaything.
Federal law says they must be managed in a way “as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.” But this seems too much to bear for the Trump administration. Right now, it is attempting to hand a piece of Yosemite to a private developer. It is bulldozing in Big Bend National Park in Texas to build a bigger border wall.
It’s scrapping a drilling buffer around Chaco Culture National Historical Park in New Mexico. But perhaps the most fitting symbol of the Trump administration's misunderstanding about national parks is its abrupt about-face over conservation in the U.S. Virgin Islands National Park.
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