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The Trump Administration Is Killing The U.S. Forest Service So It Can Also Kill U.S. Forests

When you cross into National Forest land, you are greeted with a sign boasting that you are entering into a "Land of Many Uses." This proclamation hints at a mild contradiction within the U.S. Forest Service's management of the forestland covering over a third of the United States. Since its inception over a century ago, the agency has both overseen conservation efforts and managed resource extraction by private concerns, mostly timber companies. The USFS has proved a mostly capable steward, resisting private capital's siren song of destruction and subjugation. The most important few of the aforementioned many uses are recreation, science, and simple existence. The best thing you can do for a forest is observe it and keep it from incinerating. All that careful balance is gone. The forest as we know it is the latest target of war from the Trump administration. Early last week, the Department of Agriculture announced a series of moves that amount to the dismantling of the USFS. The first and most important change is that the headquarters of the agency will relocate by some 2,000 miles, from Washington, D.C., to Salt Lake City, which not coincidentally is the nerve center of the anti–public lands movement in the U.S. Several of the most powerful figures in the war on public lands, including Utah Sen. Mike Lee, Rep. Celeste Maloy, and Gov. Spencer Cox, have based their efforts there; the 1980 Sagebrush Rebellion, a movement led by ranchers and oilmen to transfer control of Western public lands to state governments more amenable to their privatization and exploitation, began in the city. This mirrors Trump's first-term strategy with the Bureau of Land Management, which he turned over to extractivist crusader William Perry Pendley and briefly relocated alongside a Chevron corporate office in Colorado.