In Washington's forests, Trump's timber mandate looks shaky

Globe and Mail

12 hours ago

For decades now, the forests of Snohomish County have taunted the people of Darrington. It was not long ago that this small Washington town on the western slopes of the Cascade Mountains drew its life from the towering stands of Douglas fir, cedar and hemlock on federal lands that surround it on three sides.
But federal environmental rules have made the area's loggers mostly unwelcome in the places they, and the generations before them, harvested. Efforts to protect the spotted owl severely restricted timber sales on federal land.
'We've struggled since the owl wars to find an economy,' says Dan Rankin, who grew up in a local logging family and has for the past 14 years been the mayor of Darrington, a 120-kilometre drive northeast of Seattle. Four decades ago, nearly nine in 10 people here won their livelihood from the woods. Today, nearly eight in 10 work 'down below,' outside of town, commuting past the trees toward the I-5 for jobs far from the forest and closer to the state's major urban centres.
So Mr. Rankin, like many in forestry towns along the Pacific coast, had reason for hope when Donald Trump re-entered the White House with promises to start cutting trees again. On March 1, an executive order decried the suffocating effects of 'heavy-handed Federal policies' and ordered new efforts to make more national forests open to loggers.
'Done right, it would be really good,' Mr. Rankin said.
That possibility has given potency to Mr. Trump's Make America Great Again refrain. The fundamental premise of his presidency has been the restoration of places like Darrington and its countless cousins across U.S. rustbelts and farming centres.
Mr. Trump has promised to saw off regulatory handcuffs and fend off foreign alternatives so that the products of local hands can once again prosper.
The thrilling hope in forestry towns is: 'It's going to bring back the heyday,' said Mindy Crandall, an associate professor of forest policy at Oregon State University.
But more than four months into Mr. Trump's turbulent second mandate, an alternative outcome is already looming: that the dramatic actions his administration has taken since its return to office could result in fewer federal trees being cut rather than more – and that even if the White House succeeds in extracting greater volumes of timber from national forests, the chief beneficiaries are unlikely to be the people and places most in need.
Mr. Rankin's worries are rooted, in part, in what he has seen happening at the U.S. Forest Service office on the outskirts of town, home to the Darrington Ranger District of the Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest.
Decades ago, it employed 170 people.
Before Mr. Trump came to office, it was down to 28 positions.
'Then we lost another eight in the DOGE thing,' Mr. Rankin said.
The loss of additional people through the actions of the Elon Musk-backed Department of Government Efficiency means it's not clear to Mr. Rankin how the federal government could muster the people necessary to open parts of that forest to increased logging.
'You have to have staff to be able to put up timber sales,' he said.
Even before Mr. Trump returned to office, the entire Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest, which stretches across an expanse larger than Prince Edward Island, had just one timber sales administrator on staff, Mr. Rankin said.
It would be even worse, he said, if the Trump administration rushed through timber sales by short-circuiting the way things are done, which includes not just laying out proper tracts for sale but also conducting ecological and archeological evaluations.
Doing so might prompt a short-term boom, but 'in four years, if this President isn't our president any more, those things get rolled back and they're all tied up in lawsuits – and we're in 1994 again.'
It was in 1994 that a federally backed Northwest Forest Plan was set in place amidst a broader backdrop of timber wars that pitted environmentalists against loggers – and ultimately led to a huge decline in the cutting of federal forests. (A committee tasked with updating that plan was told earlier this year that it might be disbanded, Oregon Public Broadcasting has reported.)
The prospect of renewed legal warfare over the trees is far from hypothetical.
'We've had a couple of lawsuits in the works for some time already,' said Phil Fenner, president of North Cascades Conservation Council, which advocates against damaging the region's natural resources.
More could come as Mr. Trump pushes for forest development. In April, his administration proposed a regulatory revision that would alter the meaning of the Endangered Species Act in such a way that habitat destruction alone is not considered a harm to animals.
'You would have to see dead fish floating on the river before you could say there was a negative impact on that species,' Mr. Fenner said.
'These kinds of subtle rule changes are definitely setting the stage for this aggressive attack on the forest.'
The U.S. Forest Service did not respond to a Globe and Mail request for comment.
But a Forest Service employee told The Globe that there are ways to bridge the demand for more cutting with current staffing levels. One is to bolster the ranks of local offices with people sent down from central locations.
Another is to off-load the work onto private industry. Rather than have government employees lay out cuts and do the necessary study before opening a tract for sale, the Forest Service can simply stipulate that a successful bidder complete those tasks.
The Globe is not naming the employee because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
The problem, the employee said, is that it will likely prove more difficult for smaller contractors – like the nimble outfits of 'gypo loggers' that were once the lifeblood of towns like Darrington – to take on such expanded requirements.
Such an outcome would, however, be in keeping with broader economic shifts that have also hurt Darrington.
'Ownership has gone from locally owned to conglomerate-owned. Whether it's our sawmill, whether it's our grocery store, whether it's the new Dollar Tree,' said Mr. Rankin. 'The wealth that those businesses develop goes back to their headquarters. It doesn't stay in your community.'
It's a major shift from the past. It wasn't until the 1990s that Darrington owned a town snowplow. Before then, the winter streets were cleared as a point of pride by local forestry companies. Local crews of gypo loggers cut the area's trees and shaped its identity. 'I grew up in a gypo family. I played baseball on the gypo Little League team,' Mr. Rankin recalled.
Those loggers drew much of their livelihood from the federal forests.
Today, logging is often on forests that are privately held, with profits flowing to landholders based in the big cities.
The entire industry has been remade.
Figures compiled by the Western Wood Products Association show there were nearly five times as many sawmills in the U.S. in 1970 compared with 2010. Closings have continued: In Oregon, seven mills closed in 2024 alone. Output per worker, which climbed more than 15 per cent between 1997 and 2009 alone, has meant fewer people are needed to make the same volume of lumber.
Part of the restructuring has been geographic.
'Not only did mills consolidate, they tended to leave areas where they were surrounded by federal lands,' Prof. Crandall said.
'That means any federal timber sale is probably going to be farther from the mill today than it was 30 years ago. That adds to the cost. That adds to the likelihood of them not getting a successful bid on a timber sale.'
Around Darrington, decades without much cutting mean even the basic infrastructure of forestry has badly deteriorated. Jeff Anderson, a fifth-generation logger whose family-owned 3 Rivers Cutting is the last active small gypo outfit in town, figures he can no longer drive up half the forest roads accessible when he was a kid.
The local Forest Service 'can't even get to their timber at this point, let alone sell timber,' he said. The local office, too, has shed much of the equipment it would need to fix things.
'They couldn't even a dig a ditch right now if they needed to,' he said.
Fixing the problem will require spending more on federal forest management – not the cutting undertaken by the Trump administration to date.
'Trump's going to have to put up some money,' Mr. Anderson said.