By Miriam Raftery
August 26, 2019 (Washington D.C.) – A radical proposal by the Trump administration’s U.S. Forest Service would allow logging and road building on up to 75% of our nation’s public forest lands without environmental review or public input.
Today is the deadline for public comments, which you can submit at this link: : https://www.regulations.gov/comment?D=FS-2019-0010-0001
The proposed changes to the National Environmental Policy Act established in 1970 would allow the agency to also ignore impacts on climate change, habitat, and recreational use of federal forests such as Cleveland National Forest in San Diego County and federal forests surrounding national parks such as near Yellowstone and Sequoia.
It would allow activities up to 7,300 acres, including 6.6 square miles of commercial logging and 10 miles of road building, to be excluded from public review – and there is no limit on how many times the exclusion could be invoked.
Sierra Club vice chair David Reid in North Carolina calls the action an “egregious attempt on the part of the administration in Washington under Trump to take the public out of public lands,” the Citizen-Times in North Carolina reported.