US moves to open vast tracts of pristine forests to logging

President Donald Trump's administration on Tuesday proposed a rule change that would open 44 million acres of wild, undisturbed forest for road construction and logging.

The proposal would rescind the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule, enacted in the final days of the Clinton administration, which barred development across vast areas of public forests and grasslands designated as "inventoried roadless areas."

In a statement announcing the move, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said the rule had prevented the Forest Service from carrying out vital management work that would curb wildfires.

"Across the country, we've watched preventable conditions -- overgrown stands, insect outbreaks and disease -- turn healthy landscapes into tinderboxes," she said.

"For too long, outdated restrictions have kept tens of millions of forested acres off-limits to the very treatments that improve forest health and reduce wildfire risk to our communities."

An earlier draft of the proposed rule said it was "intended to return decision making for road construction, road reconstruction, and timber harvesting in inventoried roadless areas to local officials, in conjunction with Forest-level land management planning."

More than 95 percent of inventoried roadless areas run through 10 Western states: Alaska, Arizona, California, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming. The proposed rule does not apply to national forests in Colorado and Idaho because of state-specific roadless regulations.

Conservation groups reacted with anger, and legal challenges are expected.

"Trump is pushing for the largest evisceration of public lands protection in American history and against what Americans want," said Randi Spivak, public lands policy director at the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD).

The nonprofit described roadless areas in the Northern Rockies as "lifelines" for grizzly bears and lynx, adding that the proposal would also be disastrous for salmon streams and centuries-old Sitka spruce in the Tongass, the nation's largest forest located in Alaska.

The Tongass National Forest was explicitly mentioned in the draft of the rule, as directed by Trump's executive order, passed on the first day of his second term, "Unleashing Alaska's Extraordinary Resource Potential."

A recent survey by Susquehanna Polling and Research found that 77 percent of likely voters believe that "conserving national forests and other roadless lands for current and future generations" is paramount.

Only 11 percent supported opening more land for timber harvesting and mining.

More than 370,000 miles of roads were built through national forests prior to the 2001 rule, with a maintenance backlog of billions of dollars.

CBD pointed out that most wildfires are human-caused and occur near roads, with a recent nationwide study that appeared in the journal Fire Ecology finding that wildfire ignition was nearly four times more likely in lands within 50 meters of roads compared to roadless areas.

Trump's administration meanwhile is hostile towards any action to curb climate change, which is making wildfires more frequent and severe