Mark Brennan, Flickr
President Donald Trump has ordered the U.S. Department of Agriculture to open Alaska’s 16.7 million-acre Tongass National Forest—the world’s largest intact temperate rainforest—to logging and other corporate development projects, a move coming as thousands of fires are ripping through the Amazon rainforest and putting the “lungs of the world” in grave danger.
The Washington Post cited anonymous officials briefed on the president’s instructions and reported that Trump’s policy change would lift 20-year-old logging restrictions which “barred the construction of roads in 58.5 million acres of undeveloped national forest across the country.”
According to the Post, the move would affect over half of the Tongass National Forest, “opening it up to potential logging, energy, and mining projects.”
According to The Mind Unleashed, the logging restrictions have been under near-constant assault by Republicans since they were implemented, although federal courts have allowed them to stand.
Environmentalists were quick to voice outrage at the U.S. president’s move and draw comparisons between Trump and his Brazilian counterpart Jair Bolsonaro, that has rapidly accelerated deforestation in the Amazon.
As the Amazon rainforest burns and the planet’s lungs gasp for oxygen, Donald Trump has decided to lift logging restrictions in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest - a 16,000,000 acre rainforest along the Pacific Coast.https://t.co/PoueEJBuOW
— Nick Knudsen 🇺🇸 #DemCast (@DemWrite) August 27, 2019
Trump wants to lift logging restrictions in the largest intact temperate rainforest *in the world* https://t.co/h7OVAzDZQo
— Brian Kahn (@blkahn) August 27, 2019
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