By Ayurella Horn-Muller, Grist
The Agriculture Department is opening more than 112 million acres of federal forests to logging in a misguided bid to prevent fires and boost timber production.
In an emergency directive issued late last week, U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced her department’s plan to expand logging and timber production by 25 percent and, in the process, dismantle the half-century-old environmental review system that has blocked the federal government from finalizing major decisions concerning national forest lands without public insight.
Under Rollins’ direction and following an earlier executive order signed by President Donald Trump, the U.S. Forest Service would carry out the plan that designates 67 million acres of national forest lands as high or very high wildfire risk, classifies another 79 million acres as being in a state of declining forest health, and labels 34 million acres as at risk of wildfire, insects, and disease. All told, the declaration encompasses some 59 percent of Forest Service lands.
Rollins made no mention of the role climate change plays in escalating wildfire risk or intensity, or how warming contributes to spreading plant diseases and expanding invasive species ranges. Climate change, it seems, has also been overlooked in the development of the Trump administration’s proposed solution — to cut forests down.
“Healthy forests require work, and right now we’re facing a national forest emergency. We have an abundance of timber at high risk of wildfires in our national forests,” said Rollins in a press release. “I am proud to follow the bold leadership of President Trump by empowering forest managers to reduce constraints and minimize the risks of fire, insects, and disease so that we can strengthen the American timber industry and further enrich our forests with the resources they need to thrive.”
While it may seem intuitive that cutting down high-risk trees will lead to less organic material that could incinerate, environmentalists say the administration’s plans to increase timber outputs, simplify permitting, and do away with certain environmental review processes are likely to only escalate wildfire risk and contribute more to climate change.
Chopping down vast tracts of trees releases tremendous amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, exacerbating warming, which supercharges wildfire risk and causes blazes to burn faster and hotter. Though the climate science of timber management is complex, with techniques like prescribed burns considered widely effective in mitigating blaze-prone areas, the administration’s aim to rapidly ramp up deregulated logging under the premise of lessening wildfire risk is poised to backfire, not least because of the carbon costs of cutting down forests.
A map accompanying the memo from the Department of Agriculture, or USDA, indicates the stretches of forest that the agency has identified under the emergency designation. California, Colorado, Idaho, and Arizona appear to have the largest swaths of forest lands affected. Parts of the South, around the Great Lakes, and New England are also included. The USDA has not specified how many acres will be impacted per state.
The agency’s emergency order and push to expand logging to mitigate wildfire risk, ineffective as it can be if done haphazardly, is not a new strategy, said Lisa Dale, a lecturer at Columbia University’s Climate School who has researched wildfire policy for decades. Similar declarations have been passed in multiple former administrations as a way to shortcut the time-consuming and onerous review processes under the 1970 National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA. What is new about this particular directive, however, is the USDA’s explicit intention to “remove” NEPA processes. Trump imposed multiple limitations on the rule in his first term, most of which the Biden administration later revoked. In his second term, the president has sought to unravel how the sweeping environmental legislation is implemented, decentralizing how it has been governed and leaving it up to individual agencies to develop their own guidelines.
Dale said this rings “an alarm bell” as the proposed elimination of NEPA processes at the USDA would mean that, in theory, a logging company could come into a forest and extract timber without having to first evaluate the environmental impacts of its actions — like when timber production overtakes endangered species habitats.
“I’m a little skeptical about the premise of this memo,” said Dale, who has been a longtime proponent for streamlining NEPA. “The idea that we’re going to increase timber production by 25 percent and that that will be the equivalent of reducing wildfire risk? That’s the disconnect.”
As Dale noted, most of the really valuable timber is located only in a couple of states, in areas that are very difficult and expensive to access. Moreover, she said, “none of those types of timber sales have much of an impact at all on wildfire risk.”
The USDA declined to comment for the story, but a spokesperson sent Grist a public letter issued by Chris French, the acting associate chief of the Forest Service. In the letter, French first directs all officers to “use innovative and efficient approaches” to meet the “minimum” requirements of NEPA, and later notes that the agency will soon release direction for “using emergency NEPA” to “streamline and simplify our permitting process.”
The agency’s emergency declaration comes even as it continues to cull federal funding for food and farm programs, and has attempted to substantially shrink the very workforce that manages forest health and wildfire management.
Anna Medema, Sierra Club’s associate director of legislative and administrative advocacy for forests and public lands, said that the move will benefit industrial logging operations and create a negative climate feedback loop. She called the decision “a boon for the logging industry and a disaster for our national forests.” Other advocacy organizations, like the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity, have vowed to “use every legal tool at our disposal to halt the Trump administration’s implementation of this order.”
Jack Algiere, director of agroecology at Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, a nonprofit farm and research center in New York, is holding out hope that agroforestry solutions will be included in how the Forest Service carries out the new emergency order. “The thing with agriculture is that it’s working with living systems. It doesn’t matter if you’re in a forest or a vegetable field,” said Algiere, who flagged there is no mention of a long-term implementation in the memo. “Not all of these places are abandoned forests. Many of them already have management plans, and maybe this is going to disrupt that.”
Algiere also took note of how the language in the memorandum includes what he considers a lot of the “right words” — such as mentions of the Forest Service working toward land “stewardship” together with federally recognized tribes. And yet he can’t help but think about how, at the same time, the USDA is freezing and cutting funding for food programs and scrubbing diversity, equity, and climate tenets from applications.
“This could have been written in a lot of different ways,” he said. “Not unlike the rest of the USDA, there seems to be a little bit of both sides getting played out.”