Flagstaff, Arizona (azfamily) – President Trump is looking for Increases felling and timber production 25% nationwide. While some conservation groups are worried about environmental impacts, others say this is necessary to advance in the fight against wildfires.
Coconino County is surrounded by forests, including the world’s largest continuous Ponderosa pine forest. Additionally, the risk of fires is increasing. The federal government is currently working to increase logging for economic and fire mitigation reasons, but Coconino County has been on its path for years.
Coconino County is causing hundreds of millions of damage, not people used to fires, from pipeline fires to Schultz fires.
Forest Restoration Director Jay Smith said the lack of forest management increased the risk of fire. He says that healthy forests have between 30 and 50 trees per acre, while some areas around the county have more than 2,000 trees per acre.
“We’ve been filtering out fires for the past 75 years, and it’s allowed more trees to grow naturally than what’s here,” Smith said.
Therefore, since 2019, the county has spent more than $7 million on forest restoration, including reducing the number of trees.
Over the past few years, lumber mills across the country have been closed, but Coconino County opened the largest sawmill in the southwest last year to process the county’s woodcuts.
“We are one of the few areas in the country that are actually expanding the logging and lumbering industry,” Smith said. “We hope they can make 20,000 acres a year.”
The Trump administration is also focusing on the timber industry. At the beginning of March, the president signed Presidential Order Expanding U.S. wood production.
Published by US Secretary of Agriculture Brook Rollins Emergency declaration At the beginning of April, the Forest Service ordered the logs to be allowed. 112 million acres of national forest.
The administration has pointed out easing and firing economic reasons, but it also rolls back environmental protection.
Conservation groups like Sierra Club Tell them you are concerned about the environmental impact.
“If this administration were serious about the wildfire crisis, the request of Elon Musk would not disrupt the wildfire prevention staff,” said Anna Medema, associate director of legislative and administrative advocacy for forests and public lands at the Sierra Club. “We will not cut our department’s budgets or reserve funds, we will not condition disaster aid to communities destroyed by wildfires, and we will not name them industry lobbyists overseeing hundreds of millions of acres of national forests.”
Smith said this would do that. It mainly affects the Pacific NorthwestHowever, they monitor clear cuts and removal of unwanted old growing trees in the forest of Coconino.
“I don’t feel like I’m afraid that it’s part of the problem yet, but we keep an eye on it and look at it. We want to do the right thing for the forest.”
He hopes the county will increase future logging as it is one of the best ways to reduce the risk of fire.
“We have thousands of acres, and about a million acres of land in Coconino County alone, and that’s what we want to deal with,” Smith said.
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