Media Must Cover Trump's Public Lands Selloff as a Crisis

The Trump administration has formally moved to rescind the Roadless Area Conservation Rule — a 25-year-old protection that has blocked logging, road construction, and mining on nearly 45 million acres of national forest, roughly one-third of the entire National Forest System. The administration frames it as a wildfire management measure. Scientists say the opposite is true: roadbuilding increases fire risk and fragments forest ecosystems. And the timing is striking — the U.S. is currently suffering one of its worst wildfire years on record, with 7.3 million acres already burned. What the rescission would actually do is open some of the last untouched wilderness in America to the logging, drilling, and mining industries — the same industries that have spent years lobbying and donating to make exactly this happen.

This is part of a broader pattern. The same administration has shrunk national monuments, auctioned off drilling rights in protected areas, gutted the Bureau of Land Management's conservation mandates, and handed federal lands to extractive industries at a pace that has no modern precedent. The NRDC called it plainly: "the most successful land conservation policy in modern U.S. history" is being dismantled to give loggers and drillers free rein to turn iconic forests into industrial wastelands.

We call on the media to cover the rescission of the Roadless Rule not as a regulatory dispute between environmentalists and the timber industry, but as what it is: a systematic giveaway of publicly owned land to private extractive interests, dressed up in the language of wildfire prevention. The public deserves reporting that names who benefits — and what is being lost forever.