Huge giveaway of public forest resources to Big Timber advances in House!
A sprawling bill to grant the timber industry's every anti-environmental wish was now moving toward a floor vote in the U.S. House of Representatives.
The disingenuously named "Resilient Federal Forests Act of 2017" (H.R. 2936) would remove protections for millions of acres of federal forests and grasslands—places owned by all Americans—as well as safeguards for endangered wildlife and the quality of our air, water, and soils.
Authored by Rep. Bruce Westerman (R-Arkansas), H.R. 2936 among other things would:
- Expose millions of acres of protected roadless areas to destructive logging and road building, at the same time reallocating funding from environmental restoration to timber extraction.
- Take aim at the heart of the Endangered Species Act by doing away with checks and balances that exist to bolster protection for listed species and check the destruction of their habitat.
- Sideswipe public involvement and oversight under the National Environmental Policy Act by creating an array of waivers of environmental review; it even eliminates the opportunity for citizens to hold the government accountable in the courts.
- Place our national monuments in the crosshairs by overriding the designation of California and Oregon's Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument.
H.R. 2936 passed out of its first committee in late June on a party-line vote and later passed the full House on Nov. 1. Our urgent target now is your U.S. senators.
These forests and waters belong to all Americans, not just Big Timber! We will continue to oppose this disastrous measure with all the effort we can muster.
