It attacks the Roadless Rule by allowing harmful forest management activities if consistent with local forest plans, even if prohibited by national or state-specific roadless rules.
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The rule at stake is the so-called roadless rule, which established prohibitions on road construction and timber harvesting across 58.5 million acres of roadless lands in the National Forest System.
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The SUV has negotiated everything from rocky, roadless terrain ...
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The 1872 Mining Law guarantees reasonable and necessary access to explore and develop mineral claims in roadless areas, while the Federal Power Act allows for the construction of hydroelectric projects in roadless areas.
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She's been involved with the Roadless Rule since the beginning.
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One of the agenda items is the roadless area rule.
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For instance, the Forest Service approved the cutting and sale of beetle-infested spruce trees on 19,000 acres in several Utah roadless areas and road access in another roadless area to a phosphate mine.
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It encompasses nearly 21625,2900 square miles of largely roadless public lands.
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From there they commenced a long overland journey through a roadless wilderness.
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About 9.5 million acres is classified as roadless under the 93 rule.
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Congress should approve the measure, known as the Roadless Area Conservation Act.
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On national forests, the bill opens up protected Roadless Areas to commercial logging.
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This is the wild, wet and mostly roadless Chocó region of northwest Colombia.
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Portions of the US-Mexico border, for example, run through roadless, uninhabited desert.
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Peru will protect millions of acres of roadless wilderness, creating a new national park.
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Murkowski would exempt Alaska from the Roadless Rule that governs the rest of the country.
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Indigenous communities have argued against a full exemption of the Tongass from the roadless rule.
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The proposal lays out five alternatives to the change, including leaving the roadless rule in force.
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But the vast, roadless environment, and the people who live on its rivers' edges, are amazing.
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The Forest Service is accepting public comments on their proposed Alaska Roadless Exemption through Dec. 17.
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His excuse was that he was not ready to conduct an election in this vast, roadless country.
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The second rider would abruptly exempt Alaska from the landmark Roadless Area Conservation Rule promulgated in 2001.
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Costs and benefits were then added up to a single "net present value" (NPV) for the Roadless Rule.
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The regulation that protects roadless areas is more than 16 years old and has withstood multiple legal challenges.
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From 1976-2001, the average size of a roadless forest patch decreased by 24%, and grew 1.8% since 2001.
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It included six grueling days in the infamous "Darien Gap," a roadless stretch of jungle between Colombia and Panama.
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Abdul Qader Haidari, the governor in Miramor, said 22 surviving commandos and policemen reached a roadless area in his district.
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Visitors stay in environmentally sensitive mobile camps and penetrate deep into roadless parts of the park, areas replete with wildlife.
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The region is a vast, roadless landscape of meandering rivers, majestic mountains, crystal-clear lakes, and mile after mile of tundra.
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The new president, Félix Tshisekedi, has vowed to make the country less poor, corrupt, violent, ill-educated, roadless and dimly lit.
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It showed the area offered abundant food, prime denning and other habitat needs, and the securely protected roadless lands grizzlies need.
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Thus, an area was carved out where coal mining could continue, mostly in the Sunset Roadless Area, located southeast of Paonia, Colorado.
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As early as this month, the service intends to open 19,000 acres of pristine roadless national forests in Colorado to coal mining.
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Alaska's other national forest, the Chugach, has about 5.4 million acres of roadless lands that would also be opened to road building.
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In a massive giveaway to the logging industry, it eviscerates the Roadless Area Conservation rule in Alaska, home of our wildest national forests.
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We don't need to open up 88 percent of Utah's four million acres of federal roadless areas to road building and timber harvests.
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Unfortunately, the Trump administration is threatening to expand destructive clear-cut logging by proposing to exempt the entire Tongass from roadless rule protections.
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Yaguas National Park will protect millions of acres of roadless wilderness — and the indigenous people who rely on it — from development and deforestation.
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Less than a year ago, the Tambopata reserve, a roadless area about the size of Rhode Island, part forest and part savanna, was untouched.
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The Forest Service adopted the roadless rule nearly 20 years ago to protect water quality, wildlife habitat, ecological and cultural values and recreation opportunities.
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It is a vast roadless tract, home to migrating birds, the large nomadic porcupine caribou herd and the winter dens of pregnant polar bears.
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The roadless rule already allows for fuel reduction to reduce wildfire risk and for access to private property, mineral claims and oil and gas leases.
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Those were among 23 requests approved by the Forest Service in 2017 and 2018 for timber harvesting or road construction in roadless areas in Utah.
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According to the park's plans, the bears will be helicoptered in, as that's the only way to access extremely remote areas in a mostly roadless place.
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Squeezing into a wobbly four-seater propeller plane is the only way to reach the tiny tribe of Tyonek, tucked deep in the roadless Alaskan wilderness.
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Under the Trump administration's proposed changes, the 2900 million acres of inventoried roadless land in the Tongass forest would once again be considered suitable timber lands.
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Finalized in 2001, the roadless rule protected some of the last truly wild places in our National Forest System from environmentally damaging roadbuilding and commercial logging.
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Removing roadless protections from Tongass National Forest would open broad swaths of pristine, old-grown rainforest and ancient, irreplaceable trees to clear-cut logging and roadbuilding.
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Under the Trump administration's proposed changes, the 28503 million acres of inventoried roadless land in the Tongass forest would once again be considered suitable timber lands.
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The Forest Service began considering eliminating roadless area protections in the Tongass in response to a petition filed by the state of Alaska in early 2018.
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It would do so by exempting 9.6 million acres of the Tongass from the Roadless Rule, enacted by the Forest Service in 2001 under President Clinton.
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Currently in Alaska, 93 percent of National Forest System lands are designated roadless areas or wilderness where roads cannot be built, according to the U.S. Forest Service.
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The application of the roadless rule was particularly important to Alaska where decades of federally subsidized clear-cut logging have harmed our air, water, and wildlife habitat.
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But after years of legal battles and negotiations, a Clinton-era "roadless rule" seemed to settle the issue, protecting Tongass from any new logging or mining interests.
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Creation of an Alaska-specific law would determine which areas now designated as roadless would require a different "management designation to further Alaska's economic development," the statement said.
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You saw this when the Bush administration tried to roll back the Roadless Rule [a Clinton-era rule prohibiting road construction and timber harvesting on national forest land].
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In doing so, he is seeking to undermine the service's 2001 roadless rule, which prohibits road construction and commercial logging in the country's most remote and scenic forests.
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In 2012, the USFS officially adopted a Colorado Roadless Rule, which put 4.2 million acres of national forest area in the western half of the state under special protection.
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It is also a wild place, with forests of old-growth hemlock, fir and birch; wild rivers; unnamed mountain ranges; and some of the largest roadless areas in America.
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The department said the proposal, which will be published this week, exempts Tongass from the USDA's 2001 "roadless rule," which generally bars new roads in certain areas of national forests.
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I realized it was this giant swath of territory that's defined by climate, very old ethnic communities — many of which descended from the first settlers — massive wildernesses and roadless areas.
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For nearly two decades, millions of acres of the Tongass and other National Forests have been protected by a simple, flexible, and effective conservation safeguard known as the roadless rule.
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No agent could afford to take an all-terrain vehicle across vast expanses of roadless, arid lands to find a nomadic pastoralist and certify that a $140 cow had died.
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But Trump's fundraiser call last month confirmed reports that he would encourage Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue to exempt Tongass from the roadless rule, opening almost 10 million acres to development.
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These efforts have at times been applied to policies that predate the Obama administration — in this case, the 2001 "roadless rule" dates back to the Clinton era, Axios' Amy Harder notes.
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The agency's preferred option is completely exempting Tongass National Forest, the world's largest intact temperate rainforest, from the 2001 rule that aims to protect roadless areas within the National Forest system.
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On Tuesday, The Washington Post reported that President Donald Trump intends to exempt Alaska's Tongass National Forest from the Roadless Area Conservation Rule, which has long protected certain U.S. forests from development.
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And the majority of the 140,000 public comments submitted after the state of Alaska petitioned the White House to remove the Roadless Rule protections in Tongass supported keeping the policy in place.
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Mead has also fought the Roadless Rule that protects America's remaining undeveloped National Forest lands, and he chaired a Western Governors' Association committee tasked with undermining the protections of the Endangered Species Act.
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The $2 million in funds were originally intended for grants to combat wildfires, but it was later modified to allow Alaska to use it to weigh in on changes to the roadless rule.
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In his final days of office, President Bill Clinton enacted the "roadless rule," which protects 58.5 million acres of land in the U.S. forest system across 38 states from development, including the Tongass.
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Frozen lakes provide places to ice-fish, cross-country ski, and snow-mobile, and also, when thick enough, give logging trucks over-water access to isolated patches of big timber in roadless areas.
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The Forest Service reports that as of January it had approved 55 projects in roadless areas in Alaska, including 36 mining and 10 hydro or hydro-related projects, most winning approval within a month.
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It's an uninhabited, roadless and raw landscape that, Beno said, is essentially an open-air museum, filled with ancient structures and relics dating to the arrival of the first Polynesian navigators 1,700 years ago.
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The state recently asked the Department of Agriculture, which runs the United States Forest Service, the agency I once oversaw, to exempt the Tongass National Forest from the 2001 regulation, the Roadless Area Conservation Rule.
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AMMAN, Jordan — In the middle of a roadless desert on the edge of Syria and Jordan, thousands of Syrian men, women and children have been living for months in tents made of head scarves and tarp.
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Conversely, removing the roadless rule would jeopardize an irreplaceable resource while disregarding the strongly held views of many Alaskans, and other Americans, who want a thriving Tongass National Forestand its many benefits around for future generations.
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The Colorado Roadless Rule addressed this concern by defining a 19,100-acre area as the North Fork Coal Mining Area, and developing an exception that allows temporary road construction for coal-related activities within that defined area.
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After an oversight hearing the Natural Resources Committee held with experts and the Forest Service last month, it became clear that only one special interest group will benefit from an Alaska Roadless Rule exemption: the timber industry.
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In late November, Dutch couple Liesbeth and Edwin ter Velde were preparing to set out on a 3,000-mile roadless trip across the world's most treacherous landscape, from Union Glacier base camp to the South Pole and back.
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That group received $200,85033 of the grant, according to a report from Alaska Public Media, contributing to state efforts to lobby for changes to the "roadless rule" that blocks logging development in forests by limiting access to vehicles.
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That group received $200,000 of the grant, according to a report from Alaska Public Media, contributing to state efforts to lobby for changes to the "roadless rule" that blocks logging development in forests by limiting access to vehicles.
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The Forest Service announced that it had prepared a draft environmental study analyzing the impacts of altering or lifting the Roadless Rule in the Tongass forest, which includes 165,000 acres of old-growth hemlock, cedar and spruce trees.
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"I'm very pleased the administration has listened to Alaskans and is proposing a full exemption from the roadless rule as its preferred alternative," said Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, chairwoman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.
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Some 220 natural resource scientists urged the U.S. Congress in January not to eliminate the so-called roadless rule on the Tongass and Chugach forests, saying they were North America's largest "carbon sink" countering the effects of global warming.
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The Forest Service has already approved $340 million in projects to improve forest health, reduce fire hazards and provide local jobs on 1.3 million acres on areas that have roads or are roadless in national forest land in Utah.
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One option would maintain restrictions in 80 percent of the area currently protected by the rule, another would open up about 2.3 million acres to logging and construction, and another would lift all roadless rule restrictions from the forest.
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But once again, the administration is pointlessly snatching defeat from the jaws of victory by trying to open to logging Alaska's Tongass National Forest, one of the nation's largest and most effective "carbon sinks," as well as other intact, "roadless" areas.
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Another would exempt forests throughout Alaska from one of the most significant forest conservation measures of the last century, the Clinton-era "roadless rule" forbidding road building and, by extension, logging, mining and other commercial activity on roughly 50 million acres of wild national forests.
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Legislation was recently introduced in Congress by two Democrats, Senator Maria Cantwell of Washington and Representative Ruben Gallego of Arizona, to put the force of law behind the Forest Service rule to protect the nation's 58 million acres of wild, roadless federal forest land.
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Here, Heidi Hutner of Stony Brook University offers a "Your Dot" contribution on a recent test in a roadless region in Madagascar that could signal an exciting new frontier for this technology – helping deliver health care to some of the world's poorest, most isolated communities.
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Late last year, in a potentially far-reaching judgment, US District Court Judge R. Brooke Jackson ruled against USFS and the Bureau of Land Management, saying they had violated the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) by failing to do a complete environmental review of the Roadless Rule loophole.
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Legislation introduced recently in the House by Carolyn Maloney, Democrat of New York, and soon to be introduced in the Senate by Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, would designate 23 million acres of roadless public lands in Montana, Idaho, western Wyoming, and eastern Oregon and Washington as wilderness.
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Imagine taking every person in the stands at a sold-out game at US Cellular Field in Chicago and putting them in a roadless, 104-degree desert with no high-tech means of communication, little food, and with a daily ration of just a quarter of a gallon of water each.
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"La Paloma Y La Ley" is an intimate, hard to fathom look into their 51-day journey through 13 countries, across 10 borders and six days in the Darien Gap — a roadless stretch of jungle between Colombia and Panama, trying to make it to the place where they can find the American dream.
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The move, which was widely expected, comes after years of prodding by successive Alaska governors and congressional delegations, which have pushed the federal government to exempt the Tongass, the nation's largest national forest, from a Clinton-era policy known as the roadless rule, which banned logging and road construction in much of the national forest system.
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Agriculture Secretary Sonny PerdueGeorge (Sonny) Ervin PerdueTrump admin grants Santa and reindeer permit to fly into US for Christmas The White House crusade to kill food assistance Plan to lift roadless rule in Alaska's Tongass national forest threatens economy MORE has sputtered a disingenuous rationale that the rule change would promote work in a time of low unemployment.
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The world, according to Ledgard and his collaborators, might stand a chance if cargo drones delivered goods in the roadless areas of East Africa; if sentient robots were curious about the natural world; if people could immerse themselves in the sights and sounds of the deepest parts of the ocean; if plants and animals could pay people for the cost of their preservation.
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"We want to ensure we are not hindering Mr. Claus's important work of spreading Christmas Cheer for all to hear," Agriculture Secretary Sonny PerdueGeorge (Sonny) Ervin PerdueTrump admin grants Santa and reindeer permit to fly into US for Christmas The White House crusade to kill food assistance Plan to lift roadless rule in Alaska's Tongass national forest threatens economy MORE said in the statement.
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Mike Dunleavy asked President Donald TrumpDonald John TrumpStates slashed 4,400 environmental agency jobs in past decade: study Biden hammers Trump over video of world leaders mocking him Iran building hidden arsenal of short-range ballistic missiles in Iraq: report MORE to accelerate a "total exemption" from the rule — prompting the president to direct Secretary Perdue to exempt the Tongass from the roadless rule as a matter of Forest Service policy.
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The president reportedly directed Agriculture Secretary Sonny PerdueGeorge (Sonny) Ervin PerdueThe Hill's Morning Report - Dem lawmakers put guns, hate groups on fall agenda Trump moves to permit new logging in Alaska's Tongass National Forest: report Trump administration argues states have no say in healthy school lunch requirements rollback MORE to lift the restrictions put in place under the Clinton administration's 2001 "Roadless Rule" earlier this month, three sources familiar with the matter told the Post.
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President TrumpDonald John TrumpRepublican group targets Graham in ad calling for fair Senate trial Democratic presidential candidates react to Trump impeachment: 'No one is above the law' Trump attacks Schumer at fiery rally in Michigan MORE's proposal to remove roadless rule protections and allow destructive roadbuilding throughout Alaska's majestic Tongass National Forest is bad for our environment, bad for taxpayers, and bad for future generations of Americans who deserve to visit and appreciate this beautiful, pristine place.
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President Trump first directed Agriculture Secretary Sonny PerdueGeorge (Sonny) Ervin PerdueFrom state agriculture departments to Congress: Our farmers need the USMCA Overnight Energy: Trump administration issues plan to reverse limits on logging in Tongass National Forest| Democrats inch closer to issuing subpoenas for Interior, EPA records| Trump's plan to boost ethanol miffs corn groups and the fossil fuel industry Trump administration issues plan to reverse limits on logging in Tongass National Forest MORE to lift the restrictions on the Tongass under the "Roadless Rule" earlier this month, The Washington Post reported in August.
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