Trump administration opens up over half of national forests for logging

Yahoo

06-04-2025

The Brief
A new directive from the Trump administration will open up more logging in national forests.
It exempts affected forests from an objection process that allows outside groups, tribes and local governments to challenge logging proposals at the administrative level.
Whether it will result in more lumber production remains to be seen.
President Donald Trump's administration has moved to eliminate environmental safeguards on more than half of the nation's national forests, opening up 59% of the land for logging.
Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced the action Friday, citing danger from wildfires as the reason for the change.
What we know
It exempts affected forests from an objection process that allows outside groups, tribes and local governments to challenge logging proposals at the administrative level before they are finalized. It also narrows the number of alternatives federal officials can consider when weighing logging projects.
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Logging projects are routinely contested by conservation groups, both at the administrative level and in court, which can drag out the approval process for years.
Rollins did not mention climate change in Friday's directive, which called on her staff to speed up environmental reviews.
By the numbers
Forest Service officials at the regional level were told to come up with plans to increase the volume of timber offered by 25% over the next four to five years.
The emergency designation covers 176,000 square miles (455,000 square kilometers) of terrain primarily in the West but also in the South, around the Great Lakes and in New England. Combined, it is an area larger than California and amounts to 59% of Forest Service lands.
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Most of those forests are considered to have high wildfire risk, and many are in decline because of insects and disease.
What they're saying
"National Forests are in crisis due to uncharacteristically severe wildfires, insect and disease outbreaks, invasive species and other stressors," Rollins said in her directive, echoing concerns raised by her predecessor under Biden, Tom Vilsack.
What we don't know
Whether the move will boost lumber supplies as Trump envisioned in an executive order last month remains to be seen. Former President Joe Biden's administration also sought more logging in public forests to combat fires, which are worsening as the world gets hotter, yet U.S. Forest Service timber sales stayed relatively flat under his tenure.
The other side
Environmentalists rejected the claim that wildfire protection was driving the changes to forest policy.
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"This is all about helping the timber industry," said Blaine Miller-McFeeley of the environmental group Earthjustice. "It's not looking at what will protect communities. It's about the number of board feet, the number of trees you are pulling down."
The backstory
The Forest Service has sold about 3 billion board feet of timber annually for the past decade. Timber sales peaked several decades ago at about 12 billion board feet amid widespread clearcutting of forests. Volumes dropped sharply in the 1980s and 1990s as environmental protections were tightened and more areas were put off limits to logging. Most timber is harvested from private lands.
Federal law allows for the harvest of about 6 billion board feet annually — about twice the level that's now logged, said Travis Joseph, president of the Oregon-based American Forest Resource Council, an industry group.
Under Biden, the Forest Service sought to more intensively manage national forests in the West, by speeding up wildfire protection work including logging in so-called "priority landscapes" covering about 70,000 square miles (180,000 square kilometers).
Much of that work involved smaller trees and younger forests that add fuel to wildfires but are less profitable for loggers.
What's next
Timber industry representatives said they hope the Trump administration's actions will result in the sales of more full-grown stands of trees that are desired by sawmills.
The Source
This report includes information from The Associated Press.