The Department of Agriculture commits to logging public forests regardless of environmental damage expedite logging on over 100 million acres of Forest Service lands. [More inside]
Secretarial Memo would make logging dominant on over a hundred million acres, taking next step towards dismantling Forest Service
Today, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins issued a Secretarial Memo to expedite logging on over a hundred million acres of Forest Service lands.
The “emergency” memo follows President Trump’s reckless Executive Order “Immediate Expansion of American Timber Production” and misguided attempts in Congress to solve the wildfire crisis with the reckless logging bill “Fix Our Forests Act”.
100 million acres is about the size of Rhode Island.
In 2021, President Biden nominated Tracy Stone-Manning to lead the Bureau of Land Management despite her involvement in a 1989 tree-spiking plot.
In 1989, a friend of Stone-Manning's, and fellow environmental activist, was involved in tree spiking in Idaho's Clearwater National Forest. Tree spiking is a tactic used to deter logging by rendering a tree dangerous to cut, either by a lumberjack or in a sawmill, and is considered an act of eco-terrorism. At the friend's behest, Stone-Manning wrote an anonymous, profanity-laced letter to federal officials, informing them of the tree spiking and warning that "a lot of people could get hurt" if logging were to continue. In her 1993 federal court testimony, Stone-Manning admitted that she had retyped, edited, and mailed the letter. She received prosecutorial immunity in order to testify against the activist. The activist was found guilty and sentenced to 17 months in prison.
Who would get hurt? Innocent saw blades?
One saw mill worker got injured one time.
Still, I think once you've done the tree spiking, it's necessary to tell people for the deterrence to function. Otherwise you end up like the Soviets at the end of Dr Strangelove where they have the ultimate nuclear deterrent but America doesn't know about it.
Still, I think once you've done the tree spiking, it's necessary to tell people for the deterrence to function.
So just say you spiked 200 trees and they start chopping and workers get hurt, won't that work? Or is it the threat that is scary for the corpos?
Doing it at all's illegal, but I'd say if you gave them fair warning and they went ahead and started processing spiked trees then yeah it's on them
If you spike a tree in a forest and no one is there to hear it, did it happen at all?
Lmao at tree spiking being considered an act of terrorism
My partner does fire mitigation logging in an ecologically responsible way. Fire's great for the landscape, super intense fire really damages the soil, you have to manage forests that were ecologically disrupted in the 19th/20th centuries. That work shouldn't be impacted by tree spiking that isn't targeted against specific commercial loggers who don't pay their lumberjacks enough to care about opsec.
or higher up where it would affect the sawmill later processing the wood.
Sawmills are a highly centralised industry which runs on very thin profit margins.
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