The U.S. is stripping protection from its last untouched wildlife refuges.

No brakes — governments everywhere are simply tearing protected-area systems apart together, all at once. It honestly feels as if states around the world have slipped their chains and are ripping apart the last remaining refuges of wildlife. I have written about what is happening in Russia: the situation here is critical — the protected status of conservation areas is being weakened in the interests of big business. Things that once seemed simply unthinkable are now being pushed through at breathtaking speed, justified by claims of “economic necessity.”

And now the same thing is happening in the United States. In one of my earlier reports, I wrote about agreements between Russia and the United States concerning the construction of a tunnel in Alaska. The primary interests are rare-earth resources! And for that reason, U.S. authorities have begun striking blow after blow against the country’s system of protected natural areas.

Wildlife defenders in the United States are writing to me now, asking me to help bring attention to what is happening. On August 18, 2026, the Donald Trump administration took its biggest step yet toward completely dismantling the Roadless Area Conservation Rule — a federal rule that had been in effect since 2001 and specifically protected intact natural areas within national forests. In effect, it was a law protecting wildlife refuges across the country! The principle was very simple: these refuges could not be carved apart by new roads, and commercial logging was restricted.

And the logic is obvious. Any road cuts across wildlife migration routes and makes it possible to push large-scale development deeper into the wild: logging trucks and heavy machinery move in, logging spreads outward, and resource extraction follows. Large forest fires appear, soil erosion intensifies, and eventually the habitat of wild animals is reduced to fragmented pieces of what were once living ecosystems.

Simple things that, I think, everyone can understand.

And now Donald Trump, acting in the interests of big business, is dismantling the old rule, legalizing industrial logging, resource extraction, and road construction in intact wildlife refuges across the country. The authorities have already formally presented the proposed repeal and a Draft Environmental Impact Statement.

And what is especially interesting is that, in classic capitalist fashion, whenever the authorities openly lobby for the interests of big business, they try every time to justify what they are doing with something supposedly useful and necessary. In Russia, for example, officials justified legislation allowing clear-cutting around Lake Baikal by citing “the needs of the population,” while the logging of protective mountain forests across the country was justified by “economic necessity.” In the case of Baikal, one of the arguments was the need to build roads in remote wilderness areas in order to fight forest fires.

Madness!

Pure madness!

Because, according to scientific research, almost all large-scale forest destruction begins with roads pushed deep into wild nature.

The Trump administration has justified repealing the rule by citing the fight against wildfires, the need to give local managers more authority, and the desire to manage forests more actively. Yet in its own federal documents, the reform is linked to increasing timber production — meaning large-scale logging — as well as energy development, rare-earth mineral extraction (which I keep warning you about), and the redistribution of authority.

This is exactly what wildlife defenders in the United States are writing to me about. They say this is really about opening vast areas of federal land to development in the interests of big business. And what is remarkable is the scale of public reaction in the United States: after the first round of discussion alone, officials received around 625,737 comments. Environmental organizations reported at least 500,000 submissions and signatures opposing the repeal. The public response has been extremely strong.

And because the United States is currently experiencing an intense political confrontation between competing political forces, Democrats have come out against the Republicans on this issue. Congressman Jared Huffman, for example, called the decision a dangerous attack on public lands and accused the authorities of effectively putting millions of acres on the chopping block for the benefit of extractive and logging interests. Senator Martin Heinrich said the repeal would tear open habitats, damage watersheds, and make enormous areas more vulnerable.

Most likely, support from other political elites helped generate such a huge number of comments opposing the removal of protections from intact natural areas. And, remarkably, four former heads of the U.S. Forest Service — Mike Dombeck, Dale Bosworth, Tom Tidwell, and Vicki Christiansen — also came out against it. In other words, former leaders of the agency publicly stated that this is a direct attempt to seize forest lands and sacrifice them to the interests of capitalism.

Let me briefly explain how this rule came into existence in the first place and why it matters.

1. Between 1972 and 1979, U.S. authorities began identifying the last large roadless areas. Numerous scientific studies were launched to determine how many true wildlife refuges remained in the country. Thanks to the work of scientists, an enormous database was assembled — covering roughly 58.5 million acres of such lands.

   
   

2. At the same time, the authorities reached a very sensible conclusion: if roads and logging were allowed project by project, forest by forest, these territories would be destroyed gradually. But in the end, everything would be lost! They looked at forest destruction in other countries — at the model of how nature had been dismantled elsewhere in the world — and decided to protect intact ecosystems in the United States.

   
   

3. And then, on March 13, 2001, the Roadless Rule took effect. At the time, people around the world were saying that the United States had accomplished something extraordinary by placing wildlife refuges under protection. It was discussed as an example of what every other country should be doing! And the international standing of the United States grew because of decisions like this.

   
   

4. But business wants money. Powerful and influential interests want to extract profit from natural lands! And so, from 2001 to 2011, a real legal war began. Opponents tried to destroy the rule through the courts. States and interested industries attacked it. The George W. Bush administration tried to replace the unified federal system with a system based on decisions by individual states. Millions of dollars were poured into efforts to have the rule struck down using some of the best lawyers in the country. It did not work: the rule survived all of that pressure, and in 2011 a federal appeals court confirmed the government’s authority to establish such protections in order to preserve the country’s natural heritage.

   
   

5. Later, when Trump came to power, attempts began to target valuable natural areas. Between 2020 and 2023, the main battleground became the Tongass in Alaska. During Trump’s first presidency, approximately 9.37 million acres of Tongass National Forest were removed from the protection of the federal Roadless Rule.

   
   

6. Then, in 2023, the Biden administration restored those protections.

   
   

7. Trump then won the election again and returned to power. From that moment on, the attacks were no longer directed only at individual territories, but at the entire system protecting wildlife in the United States. The official documents say it plainly: more timber, more domestic energy production, more mineral extraction, and fewer federal restrictions.

   
   
8. And now, on August 18, 2026, the Donald Trump administration has effectively confirmed: we are going to dismantle nature protection in this country and hand everything over to big business. And once business sinks its teeth permanently into the protected-area system, penetrates every corner of these biological refuges, there may be nothing left to restore or bring back.

That is the disaster we are facing!

Now to the most important point. What Trump is doing is anti-scientific. It is a real threat to the wildlife of the United States and to the entire continent. Consider this: on January 29, 2026, a major peer-reviewed study was published under the title “Three-decade record of contiguous-U.S. national forest wildfires indicates increased density of ignitions near roads.”

The authors analyzed the entire record of documented wildfire ignitions on national forest lands across the contiguous United States from 1992 through 2024 — more than three decades of data. I studied this work! It is genuinely an extraordinary, in-depth FIELD study. And what the scientists demonstrated was that over 33 years of observations, ignition density was consistently and substantially higher near roads. Over that period, wildfire ignition density within 50 meters of roads in U.S. national forests reached 7.99 fires per 1,000 hectares, compared with just 1.97 fires per 1,000 hectares in protected roadless areas. In other words, fires started roughly four times more often near roads.

Yet officials continue shouting: “We are going in to fight wildfires! We are going to save the world by dismantling wildlife protections!” It reminds me of trophy hunters who kill animals, call it sport, and then justify themselves by saying: “When we shoot at living targets in the wild, we are actually saving animals. If we do not kill them, they will go extinct.” It is the same thing here. Completely analogous.

Friends!

We will continue defending the protected-area system. Share this report. Help our people. The whole world needs to unite in the struggle for Life!

© PAVEL PASHKOV