1. United States
2. Fla.
3. Letter

Who are you? This is your children's future. I mean, parents who don't care about the future of their children. There's something wrong with them and that's one of you in Florida.There's a reason you can't gun an ATV straight through a trout stream or a wildflower meadow on public land. The Trump administration just moved to erase it. The Travel Management Rule was written two decades ago for a boring, sane reason. Unmanaged motorized recreation was gouging up the backcountry, fouling water, and turning quiet ground into a demolition derby. So the Forest Service drew lines. Machines on marked trails, wild habitat left whole. Hikers, hunters, skiers, and snowmobilers all got a place, and none of them got steamrolled. Now the lines come down across almost 200 million acres of national forest. And this is the second hit in a single week. As reported by Jessica Corbett in Common Dreams, two days earlier the same administration moved to erase the roadless rule, which for 25 years kept commercial logging off roughly 45 million acres of untouched forest. Conservationists told her the pattern is impossible to miss: gut the rules that force the Forest Service to listen to the public and manage the land with care, then throw the gates open to industry and extraction. They're calling it access. Freedom. Public lands for the public. But "access" that lets a few thousand engines tear across ground that belongs to all of us is not freedom. It's the right of the loudest machine to wreck the quietest place, and everyone downstream inherits the bill. Because these are not empty lots. They are the headwaters that carry clean water to millions of people. They are ground tribal nations have held sacred and tended longer than this country has existed, ground the administration is fast-tracking with no real consultation and in plain violation of the law. The rule they're killing was never about locking people out. It was about deciding, together and out loud, which wild places we agree to leave whole. That is what they cannot stand. Not the trails. The listening. So they'll strip the map of every boundary, hand the backcountry to whoever revs loudest and cuts fastest, and call the wreckage "local control," right up until the creeks run brown and there's nothing left to protect. ___ hi