Holy shit, America, you are so fucked at this point.
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It only the damage was contained within the USA's borders.
A hundred years from now the planet will be in a pretty good shape, forests have been regrown and the seas will have been cleaned up and repopulated with fish, except for the US which is a giant hole. Not from bombs exploding, but from strip-mining the whole place for resources.
The USA will resemble Russia, China and Mordor.
In the past decade, China has regrown more than 70 million hectares of forest cover. The country has benefited greatly from solutions in biodiversity conservation, sustainable usage and climate governance, resulting in wetland and forest restoration that also combats desertification. (link to a WEF article on China's reforestation efforts)
... it has made "remarkable strides" in tackling the issue, said Xinhua, beginning in 1978 with the launch of the "Great Green Wall of China". Expected to continue until 2050, the "biggest tree-planting project in human history" will ultimately have created "88 million acres of forests in a wall stretching about 3,000 miles and as wide as 900 miles in some places", (article from The Week regarding anti-desertification efforts)
In November 2024, China's government reported that after 46 years of work it had finished the 3,000-kilometer green belt around the Taklamakan Desert. The country's forest coverage grew from 10% of the overall territory in 1949 to 25% in 2024 (this one's a link to the Wikipedia page for the Great Green Wall initiative, if you're interested)
Where's an entmoot when you need one?
March '23 Trump gave a soundbite for his billionaire bosses about building "Freedom Cities." Clear-cutting national forests, then signing an order that makes the area exempt from regulation? Sounds about right.
If they're coming for all federally governed land, indigenous reservations will be on the menu as well (always are).
🙏🏼✝️🔯☯️🕉️ Gods of the universe that ever existed real or fictional Please hear our prayers and please peacefully take this man home. His destruction is too much for the good people of earth to bear. Please consider taking Putin and Netanyahu too Than You. Amen
God here (taking temporary control of a random human as I don't have a mobile device, or thumbs for that matter): I gave y'all free choice - and I'm not talkin' 'bout the vote. Turn off the telly and go start a revolution! (or join an existing rebellion, if you prefer) All my love, God(s)
America is a dumpster fire lol, they have all these "checks and balances" but then one guy can just make all the trade policy and land use decisions by decree. What even is the point of their congress
Checks and balances all died with citizens united….only one left is the second amendment
The problem is that Congress is controlled by people who are Trump sycophants — the Republican Party kicked out everybody who wasn't.
My first thought. Seems appropriate.
Just fyi, I'm pointing out Trump's similarities to an evil villain. I'm not using this to agree. I'm very much against this, having grown up in the woods (practically raised by my local forest, as my mother was an awful drunk and single parent) and I spent most of my youth walking through the peace and quiet of the trees.
I grew up with my mother seeing nothing but my father in me, and was abused for it. Those trees gave me the shelter I needed and I would have been 100x more a mess if I didn't have them. So no. Don't take my fucking trees en masse.
My body is not ready for the amount of alcohol and dancing I am going to force myself to take part in on the day this motherfucker dies and goes to hell.
Literally, the most destructive and evil human on the planet since Hitler. I can't wait until the worms get him. I kind of feel bad for them, but I guess it's part of the job.
I predict that any company that participates in destroying the parks will end up even worse off then Tesla. I've been a hiker my whole life and I've met a lot of retired military on the trail.
Gee, why wouldn't I want to cede my country to American management and become the 51st state? You guys are knocking it out of the park, no pun intended.
Already bad enough here in Ontario with Doug "I'm a big Republican" Ford's Ministerial Zoning Order addiction, gutting environmental protection agencies, trying to sell off the Greenbelt, using covid recovery bills to get his dirt done, etc.
Any rein we've been able to keep on the timbit would dissolve into nada if we allowed the US govt to run their game here. I can't even conceive of much worse they'd make the tar sands in Alberta. 90% of the fisheries would just be trawlers digging up seabeds. Plus the dizzying amount of toxic waste they're already legally dumping here and in Mexico?
Elbows up.
didn't he say it would be like 0.5% of all federal land, or something.
One difference between the fascists and the rest of us is that for us, words have meaning, while for the fascists, they're only a tool for manipulation when spoken to somebody they see as inferior.
Finally, a good move by Trump. Those trees are taking up incredible amounts of water. This is water that could be used for more productive things, like being mixed with Kool-aid powder on a hot day. Moreover, the trees emit large amounts of oxygen, a dangerous corrosive gas. Don't listen to liberals -- tree hugging is a dangerous activity that can lead to abrasions from all the bark.
If there's anything I learned from Dr. Seuss' "The Lorax", logging can lead to impressive industrial and commercial activity and has no downsides.
It's insane that I'm 99% sure this is sarcasm, but that 1% has a voice telling me I can't discount Maga being that stupid. This is the age we live in, incredible stupidity.
Drill, drill, drill! Cut, cut, cut! Slash, slash, slash! Burn, burn, burn! You guys carry on I have to go golfing.
These are our forests. They belong to the US people. They're being stolen from us. For private profit of a few.
The absolute level of stupidity of this is ridiculous. Lumber mills are not designed for old growth trees in the modern era, so all these trees will not even become lumber. Logging has become very sustainable in recent decades. They farm trees and mill them when they reach the size that the machinery at the mills is optimized for. If we just cut down all the forests, the mills can't even process the logs even though it's better lumber. In reality, they'd just send the old growth logs to be ground for pulp which is a total waste. This video does a good job explaining it.
So I just want to chime in here as an outsider. From what I searched, national forests are different from national parks in that, extraction of natural resources from national forests is permitted for commercial and personal use.
Trump's order cites wildfire, insect and disease outbreak as the reason for this change (Biden also sought more logging to combat fire but apparently timber sales did not change much during his tenure). While I agree that forest management is important, Trump had also put tariffs on Canadian lumber and cut down jobs for national park workers. It's not hard to question if there are other motivations other than wildfire prevention in this context.
Here is a good blog post on the nationalforest.org website. Posted in 2013 (according to archive.org).
I live in fire country and I can tell you I have zero faith there's going to be any improvement to wildfire prevention. The "inefficient" forestry jobs have all been cut, and now the trails will be overgrown and the weather forecasts will be spottier. Imagine being in a fire crew in that situation, things will be more dangerous now. This is only about extracting resources.
Uhm, why can he just decide this? Not part of his expertise or departement.