On Monday the Trump administration rescinded a 2001 Clinton era roadless rule that affects 59 million acres of National Forest land. This move reveals not just an economic and political strategy, but a theology that has been at the heart of industrial forestry since its inception. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins said this about the decision:
“Once again, President Trump is removing absurd obstacles to common sense management of our natural resources by rescinding the overly restrictive roadless rule, … It is abundantly clear that properly managing our forests preserves them from devastating fires and allows future generations of Americans to enjoy and reap the benefits of this great land,”[1]
This rule affects over 30% of the National Forest System, but 90% of Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, in addition to major swaths of National Forest lands in Montana and Utah. The Trump administration’s philosophy of government revolves around deregulation in line with his Executive Order 14192, Unleashing Prosperity Through Deregulation. The order aims to reduce the barriers to extractive industries in order to stimulate the economy.
President Trump has made numerous comments to the effect that America is already a beautiful place and that the rules governing ecological health are excessive. While some want healthy ecosystems, Trump want’s a healthy economy, and sees regulations as a feature of the “swamp” in need of draining. This agricultural metaphor is apt, as it speaks to the central agrarian story at the heart of Western civilization: the natural world needs improvement through the application of technology.
In my essay “Give Me That Old Growth Religion: Finding Common Ground in the War in the Woods” I lay out three major perspectives on North American forestry: Industrial, Wilderness, and Relational. These perspectives are rooted in the worldviews shaping forestry decisions. The Industrial theology is primarily aimed at maximizing profit and social benefits in the form of economic growth, Wilderness focuses on preservation of rare and fragile ecosystems, and the Relational theology represents the approaches taken by people to live and work with a deep cultural connection to the forests they harvest from.
What seems clear from Monday’s announcement, is that each of these approaches to forest management reflects the wider worldview of its defenders. With protestant theologian Paul Tillich I think a theology is not just a belief system, butreflects one’s “Ultimate Concern”[2], something toward which one is completely oriented. In this sense an Industrial worldview that is oriented toward maximizing human flourishing is not just a policy but a theology.
The rescinding of the roadless rule reflects this theology. Opening more forests to roads is common sense because forests are a material resource for humans to manage, and a healthy economy is highest good. This approach didn’t begin with Trump or even George W. Bush. Rather, it goes back to figures like Gifford Pinchot, the famed American conservationist, who defended forests against boom-and-bust exploitation so that they would be used prudently for the benefit of the whole society. But the forest reserves he created were not ecological reserves, they were economic ones. Pinchot the conservationist had a falling out with wilderness preservationist John Muir over his view that protected areas should be “temples” where we worship rather than resources that we manage.
Despite his erratic and idiosyncratic style of governance, President Trump has merely followed along with the mainstream of the industrial forestry approach. Roads allow us to manage fires more effectively the argument goes, and to generate some wealth in the meantime. In keeping with the Industrial theology, President Trump would point to massive wildfires as evidence of poor management that has failed to maximize the forests’ economic potential. This is California’s original sin.
Unfortunately, President Trump has also consistently shown very little confidence in climate science, which should be considered when discussing forest management and the increasing severity of fires in recent years. In 2020 President Trump chided California officials in the midst of the Mcclellen Park fire claiming that sure the climate might change, but that maybe it would get cooler. When Governor Newsom insisted that climate change was a factor, Trump dismissed him saying, “Well I don’t think science knows, actually.”[3] Trump continues to ignore the repeated and consistent IPCC reports that state with the highest possible confidence that climate change is a real existential threat and a factor in increasingly catastrophic wildfires.
Despite this willful ignorance, what President Trump has fixated on is rooted in a partial truth. Much of the conservation efforts of the 1980s and 1990s promoted a hands-off management strategy that looked at the massive clear cuts of that era and proposed their opposite. This “wilderness ethic” preached that nature knows best. Thus, California’s fire adapted ecosystems were often managed to exclude fire, and as a result many state and federally managed forests became very dense with trees. Historic photos from the 19th century show massive increases in tree density for example. This density is historically mitigated by natural fires, intentional fires embedded in Indigenous food systems, and forestry.
The public facing justification for the new rollback of the roadless rule is that 28 million acres of these roadless areas are at high risk of wildfire, and allowing roads will allow management prescriptions that decrease the risk of catastrophic, stand replacing fires. The hope is that this will protect people and allow for modest harvests that will benefit the economy.
However, roadless areas are frequently far from human settlements. And in recent decades, fires in remote areas, have been allowed to burn to enable these ecologies to develop a more historically consistent fire return interval. A more frequent fire return interval results in lower intensity fires. Thus, the dense forests that burn with such high intensity have been fueled by both management decisions and climate change.
President Trump, and perhaps wilderness advocates too, refuse to accept that both things can be true and than management needs to focus on local conditions informed by local knowledge. Yet both camps are devoutly committed to their theologies of forestry: More cutting on the one hand, and less intervention on the other.
What’s more, Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, where 92% of its forests will be affected by the rollback of the roadless rule, is a sopping wet temperate rainforest. The fire risk in Southern Alaska is never zero, but it’s not a high risk. Rather, it seems clear that rescinding the roadless rule is the latest attempt by timber companies and their Industrial theology to get at the old growth forests in Alaska it has been drooling over for decades. To make an economic impact, management interventions, likely large clear cuts, will negatively impact dozens of species, including bears, salmon and whales, which are also intimately connected to the economy of Southern Alaska.
Unfortunately, the loudest voices about the implications for the Tongass National Forest will be the Industrial theology who frame the development as a major boon for jobs and industry, and the Wilderness theology who lament this as a desecration of sacred old growth wilderness. Nuanced rural and Indigenous voices will likely be marginalized by these two dominant theologies.
Yet, if we would just look to Indigenous and rural communities, we would see that a healthy economy and healthy ecosystems do not have to be mutually exclusive. They only require a Relational theology that is more committed to the places we are managing than to ecological purity or corporate profits. Forests are not just sacred sanctuaries for weary urbanites, and they are not just crops for absentee corporate landlords. They are places with names, and there are people who love them. Perhaps instead of the tired back and forth posturing over jobs versus the environment, its time to return to a theology that sees people whose lives are tied to the places they manage as the best way to ensure that the earth community, including us humans, prosper.
[1] The administration’s Press Release: https://www.usda.gov/about-usda/news/press-releases/2025/06/23/secretary-rollins-rescinds-roadless-rule-eliminating-impediment-responsible-forest-management
[2] See Paul Tillich, Dynamics of Faith
[3] https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-briefing-wildfires-mcclellan-park-ca/
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