Beyond its brutal immigration enforcement campaigns and horrifying attacks on Iranian civilians, the Trump administration has made steady progress dismantling one of the US’s national treasures: its forests.
Since Donald Trump took office for the second time last year, his administration has set about firing roughly 10 percent of the US Forest Service staff, accelerating the harvesting of federal forests for private profit, and opening protected wildlife areas for exploitation by oil and gas conglomerates.
Under his direction, the government is also spreading oceans of the toxic herbicide Roundup on clear-cut and fire-impacted forests across the country, Mother Jones reports. Roundup, a brand name of herbicide made of glyphosate salt and sold by chemical giant Bayer, has long been alleged to cause multiple types of cancer in humans, particularly the group of blood cancers known as non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
Roundup’s effect on forest life is also appalling. As the Forest Service’s own 2011 ecological risk assessment on glyphosate notes, the government’s key reason for using the chemical is “conifer release,” a forest management technique which involves removing grasses, shrubs, and forbs which might otherwise stunt the growth of young conifer trees.
While it’s possible to do this by hand — without spraying carcinogenic chemicals on forest undergrowth — the labor cost adds up quickly. As Mother Jones notes, it can cost up to three times as much to hire workers to carefully practice conifer release by hand. If there’s one thing we know about the Trump administration, they’re all about saving a few bucks here and there, which is probably why the president invoked the Defense Production Act to boost glyphosate production and extend legal immunity to herbicide manufacturers back in February.
Indeed, the amount of glyphosate we’re using on forests across the country only seems to be going up. In 2023, California authorities spewed 266,000 pounds of pure glyphosate across state forests — about five times the amount they used 20 years prior.
Under Trump, those numbers are set to skyrocket. The administration has approved Bayer’s proposal to build a new phosphate mine on 1,800 acres of public land in Idaho, phosphate being a crucial precursor for glyphosate production. Trump’s solicitor general, Dean John Sauer, has personally intervened in a Supreme Court ruling that would help shield Bayer from lawsuits related to medical effects of Roundup. The Environmental Protection Agency has all but shuttered the federally-funded UC Berkeley labs studying the effects of glyphosate on human health.
Coupled with the approval of aggressive logging quotas targeting federal lands, it’s clear the Trump administration is less concerned with protecting the nation’s conifers in the long-term than with treating the land like one sprawling tree farm, consequences be damned.
More on trees: You’ll Spill Your Juice When You Learn How Many of Florida’s Orange Trees This Incurable Bacteria Has Already Infected
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