Trump administration rolls back forest protections in bid to ramp up logging

BILLINGS, Mont. (AP) — President Donald Trump's administration acted to roll back environmental safeguards around future logging projects on more than half of U.S. national forests under an emergency designation announced Friday that cites dangers from wildfires.

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.

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins did not mention climate change in Friday's directive, which called on her staff to speed up environmental reviews.

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.

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.

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.

Most of those forests are considered to have high wildfire risk, and many are in decline because of insects and disease.

“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.

Those threats — combined with overgrown forests, more homes in wild areas and decades of aggressive fire suppression — add up to a “forest health crisis" that could be helped with more logging, said Rollins, a former conservative legal activist and president of a Trump-aligned think tank.

Concerns about lost safeguards

Environmentalists rejected the claim that wildfire protection was driving the changes to forest policy.

In response to the new directive, 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. In a letter from Acting Associate Chief Chris French, they were also told to identify projects that could receive “categorical exclusions,” which are exemptions from stringent environmental analyses.

“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 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.

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.

Biden proposed more protections for old-growth forests, drawing backlash from the timber industry, but that plan was abandoned in the administration’s final days.

Timber industry wants more trees available

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. 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.

“This industry needs a raw supply to remain competitive and keep the doors open,” he said. “We're not even reaching half of what forest plans currently call for. Let's implement our forest plans across the country, and if we did that, that should increase the volume that's available to American mills and create American jobs and create revenue.”

Trump last month ordered federal officials to investigate the possible harms of lumber imports to national security. The administration said Canada and other countries engage in lumber subsidies that disadvantage the United States. Canadian timber was left out of the president's latest round of tariffs.

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Associated Press writer Matthew Daly in Washington contributed.