CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

The ‘Unintended Consequences’ From Massive Deforestation Projects Continue to Mount

The plans for a U.S. Forest Service project happened after a December storm. This picture is from that public report, which was only being circulated for about a week for public comment.

Twenty-three years ago, the Bush administration and Republican majorities in both chambers of Congress passed the so-called “Healthy Forests Restoration Act.”  Falsely claiming our forests were “unnaturally dense,” they redefined living forests full of trees as unacceptable “fuel loading,” and set about to promote “landscape scale” logging, thinning, and burning projects across millions of acres of National Forests to return them to “health.”

But then the unintended consequences began to mount and have only grown more dire in the last two decades.

Historically, the Forest Service has served the timber industry, not the forests.  Having lost the “timber wars” of the ’90s due to widespread opposition, the agency had to come up with a reason to continue logging our dwindling forests.  As higher temperatures and extreme drought impacts from a rapidly overheating climate continued to grow,........

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