Jignesh Darji

“In fact, mostly what the Forest Service does is build roads. I am not kidding. There are 378,000 miles of roads in America’s national forests. That may seem a meaningless figure, but look at it this way—it is eight times the total mileage of America’s interstate highway system. It is the largest road system in the world in the control of a single body. The Forest Service has the second highest number of road engineers of any government institution on the planet. To say that these guys like to build roads barely hints at their level of dedication. Show them a stand of trees anywhere and they will regard it thoughtfully for a long while, and say at last, “You know, we could put a road here.” It is the avowed aim of the U.S. Forest Service to construct 580,000 miles of additional forest road by the middle of the next century. The reason the Forest Service builds these roads, quite apart from the deep pleasure of doing noisy things in the woods with big yellow machines, is to allow private timber companies to get to previously inaccessible stands of trees. Of the Forest Service’s 150 million acres of loggable land, about two-thirds is held in store for the future. The remaining one-third—49 million acres, or an area roughly twice the size of Ohio—is available for logging. It allows huge swathes of land to be clear-cut, including (to take one recent but heartbreaking example) 209 acres of thousand-year-old redwoods in Oregon’s Umpqua National Forest.”
― Bill Bryson, A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail