58 Million Acres of American Wilderness Opened to Logging

The Trump administration's war on America the Beautiful reaches unthinkable heights.

I’ll get straight to it.

The Trump administration just torched one of the last meaningful environmental protections left on our public lands, the 2001 Roadless Rule. With a carnival-barking press release from USDA, they opened 58 million acres of undeveloped national forest to roads, logging, drilling, and extraction.

The systematic looting of the American public estate now stretches into its most sacred corners.

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, a certifiable Karen who has the environmental credentials of someone who failed science and thinks trees are just tall weeds, called the universally acclaimed roadless rule “absurd.” Called 800-year-old cedars in the Tongass an “obstacle.” Called it a win for “sustainability.”

Are you out of your mind?

These are the most pristine, carbon-rich, ecologically vital forests in the country. They filter drinking water for millions. Anchor our climate. Shelter endangered species. And they’ve been protected for nearly 25 years with overwhelming public support.

Now they’re being tossed to the timber industry like chum in a shark tank, all so Trump can hand his donors a scorched continent on the way out the door.

Let’s Be Clear About What Just Happened

The Roadless Rule isn’t some obscure regulation. It was one of the most significant conservation achievements since Theodore Roosevelt invented the national forest system. It stopped logging, mining, and road-building on the last wild, undeveloped public lands in America’s national forests. Not parks. Not monuments. Forests. The sprawling, connective tissue of the American wild.

And they just blew it up.

In the last Trump administration they only targeted the part of the Tongass that timber companies were salivating over. 8 million or so acres of old growth that could be relatively easily logged. This time they decided to just scrap the Roadless Rule altogether and open all of the Tongass, the Frank Church Wilderness in Idaho, ancient mountaintops in Virginia, and other beautiful, wild, untouched places. Roads can now cut through intact ecosystems that have stood for thousands of years.

And for what?

Not for jobs. Not for rural economies. Not even for the timber industry, which, in many cases, doesn’t want to venture into these remote, roadless areas because they’re too expensive to log and too controversial to be worth the backlash.

No, this is bloodsport for ideologues. A joyless, dead-eyed crusade waged by Heritage Foundation lifers and Koch-funded policy ghouls who’ve spent their careers trying to dismantle every last protection that keeps public land public. These people don’t care if the trees fall or not, they just want to prove they can make them fall. It’s about domination. About desecration. About taking something beautiful and irreplaceable and proving it was never safe from them.

It’s not policy. It’s barbarism.

This Goes Far Beyond the Tongass

There will be a lot of talk about how this will affect the Tongass, as well there should be. The Tongass is the last great old growth forest on earth. It’s the crown jewel of America’s forests, and this sadistic act will destroy it.

But let’s not pretend this stops at the Tongass or a few other obscure wildernesses that few people visit. This repeal affects roadless areas in nearly every national forest in the country. 58 million acres. That’s a third of the entire National Forest System now wide open to large-scale industrial vandalism.

And it’s not just logging. The repeal paves the way, literally, for mining, oil and gas development, and permanent fragmentation of lands that were, until now, protected and intact. You like clean water? Kiss it goodbye. You like intact wildlife corridors? Forget it. You like climate stability? You’re gonna need it when they’ve burned every regulatory bridge behind them.

I can’t stress this enough, it’s not just reckless. It’s deliberate. They want these places broken. Because broken lands don’t fight back. And broken lands mean broken spirits. And that means people that are easier to manipulate and dominate.

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What Happens Next

The administration still has to go through a formal rulemaking process, publish the repeal, open it to public comment, then finalize it in the Federal Register. That takes a few months. Once it’s finalized, lawsuits will follow, and they’ll be fierce. Earthjustice, NRDC, the Southern Environmental Law Center, tribal nations, and state attorneys general will sue under the Administrative Procedure Act, NEPA, and the Endangered Species Act. If they can secure an injunction, the repeal gets frozen while the case moves through the courts. That buys us time.

But make no mistake, the Trump administration is counting on the Supreme Court to bail them out. They’ve done it before. Over and over this year, the Court has granted emergency appeals to override injunctions on immigration and other policies. No arguments. No hearings. Just a one-paragraph order and a green light. All it takes is one emergency application and five justices willing to say yes. And lately, they’ve shown they don’t need much of an excuse.

So yes, the lawsuits matter. They matter a lot. They could slow this down for years if we’re lucky. But at the end of the day we can’t rely on the judiciary to defend something it no longer seems to understand: the public good.

Which means the rest is up to us.

Now is the Time for Good Trouble

Support the lawsuits. Fund them. Share them. But don’t stop there. This fight will be won or lost in the open. In the press, in the streets, and yes, in the forests. Sustained outrage is now a national obligation. They need to feel pressure in every congressional office, every hearing room, every agency hallway, every corporate boardroom, and every Forest Service field office. If they try to auction off access to these forests, we need to show up. Loudly. Physically. Repeatedly.

If we let them turn America’s last wild forests into timber leases and tailings piles, then we’re not just losing real and magnificent places. We’re losing the very idea of public land. The idea that there are places in this country that don’t exist to be monetized. That belong to all of us, and to the future.

Though it may feel like it, know this: We’re not powerless. We can still show up. We can still get in the way. We can still make good trouble in defense of our lands and our American ideals.

Because once these places are gone, they’re gone.

And if we don’t fight for them now, we’ll be the ones who let them fall on our watch.

—Jim