{"id":818746,"date":"2026-08-19T12:24:20","date_gmt":"2026-08-19T12:24:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/818746\/"},"modified":"2026-08-19T12:24:20","modified_gmt":"2026-08-19T12:24:20","slug":"trump-moves-to-open-california-forestlands-to-logging-roads","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/818746\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump moves to open California forestlands to logging, roads"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Rachel Becker<\/a>, CalMatters<\/p>\n

This story was originally published by CalMatters<\/a>. Sign up<\/a> for their newsletters.<\/p>\n

The Trump administration announced Tuesday it is rolling back a rule prohibiting logging and road construction in undeveloped parts of national forests, including more than 4 million acres of federally managed forest lands in California.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The change could open some of California’s most remote backcountry to new roads and development \u2014 even as U.S. Forest Service research shows that roads are a major source of wildfire ignitions in the state’s national forests.<\/p>\n

People start most of California\u2019s wildfires<\/a>, including on federal land \u2014 and it\u2019s not just sparks from faulty power lines. Fires can start in many ways: A hiker might burn toilet paper in the backcountry, a hot tub might be miswired, or someone might drag a tow chain or pull a hot car onto dry grass.\u00a0<\/p>\n

U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins, who first announced the plan last year, said today that federal officials filed a proposal and environmental impact statement to rescind the rule in order to reduce barriers to managing fuels on public lands.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cFor too long, outdated restrictions have kept tens of millions of forested acres off-limits to the very treatments that improve forest health and reduce wildfire risk to our communities,\u201d Rollins said in a statement.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But in California, the U.S. Forest Service\u2019s own research points to a complication: Roads and the people who travel on them are known conduits for fire.<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n

Scientists with the U.S. Forest Service mapped 26 years of fire ignitions along roughly 850 miles of roads in the Angeles, San Bernardino, Los Padres and Cleveland national forests. All of them, according to a Forest Service map, also contain roadless reaches.<\/a><\/p>\n

The mapping effort revealed that nearly two-thirds of the fires people caused in these forests sparked along roadsides<\/a> \u2014 places where people, the sparks they create, and fuel in the form of flammable, invasive grasses often converge.\u00a0<\/p>\n

California Natural Resources Secretary Wade Crowfoot said that the roadless rule has not hindered California\u2019s forest management and prescribed fire efforts.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIn fact, more than 240,000 acres of roadless land in California have undergone vegetation treatments to reduce wildfire risk and protect nearby communities,\u201d Crowfoot said in a letter to Rollins last September. He cited an example in the Caples Creek roadless area south of Lake Tahoe<\/a>, which he said helped shield communities during the 2021 Caldor Fire.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Crowfoot warned that opening these areas to construction, timber harvests and mining \u201cmay put rural communities at increased risk of fire and significantly increase firefighting costs of California.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

A National Pattern<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not just California. A recent, peer-reviewed study<\/a> by scientists with The Wilderness Society reported earlier this year that wildfire ignitions in national forests across the country are four times more likely near roads. From 1992 to 2024, wildfire ignition densities were lowest in designated wilderness areas, followed by roadless areas. They were highest within 50 meters of roads.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cOpening our backcountry forests to more roads and development, and therefore more ignitions, is also not a wildfire solution, and never will be,\u201d Josh Hicks, The Wilderness Society\u2019s director of conservation campaigns, said in a statement.<\/p>\n

The Trump administration said rescinding the rule doesn\u2019t automatically mandate timber harvests or building roads. Instead, it would leave decisions to local national forest managers.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cFuture land management decisions would be based on natural resource conditions and needs and informed by states, tribes, and communities,\u201d the Agriculture Department\u2019s announcement said today.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Why more roads?<\/p>\n

Environmental advocates are skeptical, especially in light of the Trump administration’s executive order last year<\/a> calling for an \u201cimmediate expansion of American timber production.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

The roadless rule also already allows for roads to be constructed or rebuilt to protect health and safety from the threat of wildfire.<\/p>\n

Retired U.S. Forest Service chiefs, including one who served during the first Trump administration, said in an opinion piece last year<\/a> that repealing the rule threatens key watersheds and wildlife.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWhy build more roads when the agency, strapped for resources, can\u2019t even maintain the ones that already exist?\u201d they asked. \u201cLet\u2019s not forget the reasons these backcountry areas do not have roads.\u202fThe easily accessible high-value timber from national forests has been harvested. What little that remains in these roadless backcountry areas is difficult and costly to access.\u201d<\/p>\n

U.S. Rep. Jared Huffman, a California Democrat and ranking member of the House Natural Resources Committee, blasted the Trump administration for moving forward on rescinding the rule during a catastrophic fire season following the Trump administration\u2019s slashing of the U.S. Forest Service. He vowed to fight it in Congress.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Trump administration is at again, selling out our public lands to corporate polluters, ignoring the overwhelming objections of the American people,\u201d Huffman said in a statement. He added: \u201cIt\u2019s reckless.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

The public has until midnight on Sept. 21st to comment<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

This article was originally published on CalMatters<\/a> and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives<\/a> license.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Rachel Becker, CalMatters This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters. The Trump…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":818747,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[12,192,79,6399],"class_list":["post-818746","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-donald-trump","tag-environment","tag-science","tag-wildfires"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/818746","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=818746"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/818746\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/818747"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=818746"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=818746"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=818746"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}