Trump Moves to Open America’s Wildest Forests to the Bulldozer

Dawn is most memorable, the awakening hour in Bear Swamp, a 3,915-acre expanse of the Huron-Manistee National Forest in northern Michigan. Even after the somnolence of night, morning light is not nudged by the sound of anything connected to industrial America.

Such tracts of backcountry forest, unreachable on any road, are features of America’s grand necessity to honor and safeguard its wilderness expanses. Some 91 wild areas in Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin are part of a nationwide network of 2,500 so-called “roadless” units of the National Forest Service that have been closed to any kind of motorized traffic under a magnificently conceived federal rule approved in 2001.

To hike or bike or paddle through these landscapes is to honor the sacred celestial spirit of America’s backcountry. Yet since June 2025 it’s also to recoil at another outrageous plan introduced by the White House and the Forest Service that displays President Trump’s contempt for ecological values and wild places.

The president and his Republican allies in Congress want to kill the roadless rule, allow new roads to be built, and open tens of millions of acres of forest – most of it untouched by industrial society – to development. The process to delete a 25-year-old safeguard supported by most Americans, a deregulatory march to environmental wreckage that seems inevitable by now, is due to be completed before the end of the year.

On its own, ending barriers to new roads on lands where no bulldozer has tread is a savage betrayal of the natural order, an outrage that should appall every American. In their ecological value, wild lands have few equals. Forests scrub the waters, clear the air, shelter animals, and connect people to the quiet places where they feel embedded in the limbed and robust realm of nature.

Wilderness and Character

In metaphysical terms, wilderness helps define who we are as Americans. Henry David Thoreau and John Muir described the country’s wild places as hallowed spaces that are morally and spiritually necessary for the country to thrive. Frederick Jackson Turner argued in 1893 that American democracy, forged by restless, inventive, freedom-loving people, was shaped by the frontier. Wild spaces are an essential feature of our national character.

But in this mess of an administration, the man in charge has no such allegiances. The sunset of the roadless rule, wanton as it is, is tantamount to felling more old growth forest in the clearcut Trump is making in America’s 135-year-old history of wildlands preservation.

Trump is intent on ruining what has been a stellar record of protection. Here are three of the most significant features of the legacy he wants to dismantle.

In 1891, Congress approved and President Benjamin Harrison signed the Forest Reserve Act that provided presidents with the authority to put particularly beautiful or valuable tracts of land off limits to industrialization.

In 1906, President Teddy Roosevelt developed and signed the Antiquities Act that authorized presidents to protect wild places as “national monuments.”

In 1964 President Lyndon Johnson signed the Wilderness Act that has protected over 100 million acres and put into legal language the essential ideas of Thoreau and Muir to secure wild spaces “where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man,” and where man is “a visitor who does not remain.”

These and dozens more specific laws, including the 1968 Wild and Scenic Rivers Act and the 1973 Endangered Species Act, secured the nation’s natural domain. These restrictions fenced out damaging intrusions on wild places and are part of the reason that international visitors this year attending World Cup matches marvel at America’s scenic beauty. To hike or saddle up to spend time in untouched forests, or paddle streams made crystal clear by miles of standing trees, is to be embedded in the spirit of America’s wild terrain.

Legacy Rejected By Trump

All of that – and this is no exaggeration – is being challenged by Trump. No president, nor any Congress, has set out to carve up the legal infrastructure securing America’s wild forests and natural bounty with such monstrously sharp blades. Based on a succession of executive orders and allied Congressional legislation the stockades of protection are coming down. A sampling:

• The White House authorized a border wall to be constructed across the wild lands of Texas bordering Big Bend National Park.
• Congress authorized a Chilean mining company owned by a Trump family friend to evade federal forest protections and begin the process of permitting a new mine near the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in Minnesota.
• The president authorized a new road across the Brooks Range and Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve to provide access to a mining district.
• The administration is moving to open roughly 1 million acres of California public lands to drilling and fracking, including lands on the borders of Sequoia and Pinnacles national parks, Carrizo Plain National Monument, and the Sequoia, Los Padres, and Inyo national forests.
• Trump signed a proclamation in February to open the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument in the Atlantic Ocean to commercial fishing, and in April put the proclamation into effect to rescind the fishing restrictions. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration did so by entirely skipping public review and comment.

The deconstruction of the 25-year-old roadless rule is a feature of this purposeful degradation. In 2001 President Bill Clinton and Mike Dombeck, the head of the U.S. Forest Service, completed years of public review and summoned intelligence no longer common in federal governance to outlaw new roads across 58.5 million acres of particularly wild expanses of national forests. Most of the protected forest is in Alaska and the West. Some 44 million acres are in peril because Idaho and Colorado have individual state roadless policies that would be exempt from the federal change.

Bear Swamp in Michigan is one of the smallest wild tracts that will lose protection under Trump’s new policy. In the shadow of its trees, the stillness of its setting, Bear Swamp honors America’s allegiance to the wild places that inhabit our national character.

Here, there is none of the contempt for nature and Michigan’s environment expressed by America’s president. Wild places are necessities of life that sustain the state and this nation. Stripping protections from Bear Swamp and all the other roadless forests demands vehement, persistent opposition.

Lead image: A USFS road in the Manistee National Forest, Michigan. Credit: RomanKahler, CC BY-SA 4.0