The Trump administration’s aggressive efforts to open up swathes of the American wilderness to commercial logging are raising everything from eyebrows to serious concerns among scientists and current and former federal land managers.
A month after President Trump signed two executive orders regarding the national security concerns of timber and lumber exports and expansion of American timber production, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins tripled down.
The secretary published a memo creating an “emergency situation determination” for over 112,646,000 acres (455,862 square kilometers) of national forest. There are 154 national forests in the United States, comprising about 188.3 million acres (762,000 sq. km), so the affected areas are about 60% of all the country’s national forest lands.
Framed as a way of addressing a crisis of wildfires, the memo “relies heavily on references to ‘domestic timber production’ and ‘heavy-handed federal policies’ like environmental safeguards,” as noted in a Los Padres Forest Watch release.
When contacted for comment, ForestWatch executive director Jeff Kuyper referred Gizmodo to his comments in the release: “This is a thinly veiled attempt to ramp up logging on our national forests, bypass environmental laws, and line the pockets of the timber industry,” which “coupled with mass firings, budget cuts, and environmental rollbacks … will wreak havoc on the Los Padres and other national forests across the country.”
The second Trump administration’s first 100 days has focused on systematically slashing funding and staff across key federal science agencies, undermining their ability to research, monitor, and respond to environmental and public health crises.
At the behest of the administration, agencies like NOAA and NASA are having to lay off staff and cancel contracts and research programs in the name of cost-cutting, despite their critical roles in tracking everything from hurricanes to wildfires. Many scientists and public servants are also being pushed out or reassigned from the National Park Service, part of a broader effort by the administration to cull the numbers of workers managing our country’s wildlife refuges.
As indicated in the secretary’s memo, the government would argue that the emergency determination is protecting the forests, not rolling back their protected status. But some experts disagree.
“These orders are under the pretense of enhancing national security which most realize is bogus,” said Elaine Leslie, the former chief of biological resources for the National Park Service, in an email to Gizmodo. “The policies articulated and implemented will weaken environmental protections to benefit wealthy corporations in an expedited manner.”
That’s not to say that Leslie and other ecologists are against managing wildland. Quite the opposite: Prescribed fires and thinning are regular devices in the forest management toolkit, helping to reduce the spread of out-of-control and massive wildfires and encouraging local environments to thrive.
There is plenty of evidence that particular tree removal treatments reduce the severity of wildfires, said Mark Ashton, an ecologist at Yale University and director of the university’s forests, in an email to Gizmodo.
Besides that, the country’s national forests are managed quite differently than its national parks. “Much of their land base has been managed for timber and logging—so there is nothing new to that,” Ashton said. “It is a question of how and where it is done.”
And there’s the rub. The scale and approach to logging and land management may look very different under the Trump administration, affecting a huge swath of national forests under the recent executive orders and secretarial memo.
“Thinning isn’t logging—generally removing smaller [diameter at breast height] trees,” Leslie said. “Logging generally harvests large, mature, often old-growth trees in quite large tracts.” In other words, the government’s executive orders seem to target a very different component of forested areas than those targeted by people reducing the risk from fires.
“If it was normal administration with an intact full professional workforce working for the Forest Service—this should not be an issue,” Ashton noted.
“The Forest Service has a level of expertise matched by no other organization in the world—or at least it did have,” he added. “It is worrying in the fact that so many of these people have been released and it is difficult to see if this administration will adhere to the multitude of rules and regulations that governed the management of the land.”
“As shown, many forests supervisors have quit or retired. Civil servants are at a point of follow orders or they know they will be fired,” Leslie said. “Hopefully the environmental groups come together to sue.”
The Biden administration didn’t do as much as it could to protect America’s forests, either, but the new administration’s attitude towards science agencies and national parks to date doesn’t offer much confidence in their stewardship of our unspoiled national forests.
“I think what is of critical importance are the long-term consequences of these expanded actions,” Leslie said. “This type of logging without thorough environmental analysis will put endangered species at risk. It will threaten biodiversity, water quality and whole watersheds. It will decrease wildlife habitat and increase fragmentation.”
According to the Los Padres Forest Watch, the most destructive fires won’t be prevented by commercial logging—rather, those blazes are fueled by extreme winds (like those that powered Los Angeles’ devastating wildfires at the beginning of the year) and climate conditions.
“By using ’emergency’ declarations to fast-track commercial logging under the false promise of fire protection, the Trump Administration is putting special interests ahead of science and leaving local communities more vulnerable at a critical time when climate change is worsening fire risk across the country,” the Forest Watch stated.
But this administration has made no secret of its position on climate, either. The fractious situation between the administration and the national forests may well end up in the courts, but Trump’s actions indicate that the current administration would prefer to move fast and break things than whatever the less chaotic alternative is. And if you chop down old growth forest, it’ll take a long time to get it back.
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