Trump’s Order to Expand Logging Threatens to Increase Climate-Fueled Wildfires

On March 1, President Donald Trump signed an executive order titled “Immediate Expansion of American Timber Production.” The order claimed “onerous Federal policies” have hindered domestic timber production and that expanding logging was a matter of protecting “national and economic security.” It ordered the secretary of the Interior and head of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), who oversee the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) respectively, to develop a plan to expand timber targets and streamline permitting “to suspend, revise, or rescind all existing regulations, orders, guidance documents, policies, settlements, consent orders, and other agency actions that impose an undue burden on timber production.”

The responsible departments and agencies were instructed to find categorical exclusions to the National Environmental Policy Act and use “emergency regulations” to circumvent the Endangered Species Act (ESA).

After Trump’s order, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service continued the assault on endangered species by proposing a new rule that would redefine “harm” under the ESA to only include directly killing species, replacing the current definition that includes destruction of a species’ habitat. Habitat destruction is the greatest source of species extinction.

In April, USDA head Brooke Rollins directed the stripping of forest protections on more than half of all national forests and called for expanding timber production by 25 percent to address a “wildfire emergency,” and restore forest “resources.” A report from the Associated Press says the directive “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.”

A map of forests Rollins has targeted includes all national forests in Washington State and California, and large sections throughout the west and other parts of the country. It even includes some wilderness areas. These forests contain some of the most cherished old-growth and mature forest ecosystems remaining in the U.S.

In the Pacific Northwest, millions of acres of older and mature forests and old-growth dependent species like the northern spotted owl were finally protected by the Northwest Forest Plan (NWFP) in the 1990s after a century of logging that had reduced the forest to about a fourth of its historical extent. The NWFP happened as a result of intense forest defense and protest by Earth First! and many other environmental groups, studies by forest ecologists and court injunctions. The idea that these forests of immense trees, stunning natural beauty, rich biodiversity and crucial reserves of carbon sequestration could now, once again, be opened to logging is stomach-turning.

In late April, Idaho Gov. Brad Little issued his own executive order in line with Trump’s, aiming to ramp up logging with the same “rationale” as the Trump order, combatting increased wildfire danger. The order appears to replace federal responsibility for forest management in that of the state.

Jeff Juel, forest policy director for Friends of the Clearwater (FOC) said, “The state of Idaho has not earned the trust of the American public to manage forests while preserving old growth, assuring wildlife populations are robust and healthy, or maintaining hunting and fishing opportunities.… They are, on the other hand, experts at clearcutting and making state lands resemble a war zone.”

Climate Change and Wildfire

Trump’s order called for “forest management and wildfire risk reduction projects” to “save American lives and communities.” Yet none of the administration’s orders even gave lip service to the overwhelming preponderance of evidence that climate change is the main driver of more severe wildfire that has resulted in the destruction of whole communities in the west in recent years, including parts of Los Angeles.

Dominick DellaSala, chief scientist with Wild Heritage, whose stated mission is to protect and restore forests and safeguard biocultural diversity around the world, told Truthout that Trump’s policies are “a double whammy on the climate. By beginning the process of withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement, they’re going to continue to drill for fossil fuels and increase our emissions to the atmosphere. At the same time, they’re talking about an executive order that would increase logging on 280 million acres of forests across the U.S., bypassing the nation’s … landmark environmental laws, even the Endangered Species Act.”

DellaSala led an international team of scientists in doing the first nationwide mapping of mature and old-growth forests in the U.S. Their analysis found these forests sequester 9 percent of the nation’s total emissions.

“These big, fast-moving fires are the combination of extreme fire weather caused by anthropogenic climate change interacting with heavily logged landscapes. So it’s that double whammy again, by doing more logging and contributing to more emissions, you have a feedback on fire weather over the long run, that’s what’s really driving these big fires,” DellaSala told Truthout. “The latest climate attribute models are showing now that we can explain a lot of the causality around these big fires because of the increase in spring and summertime temperatures, especially heat domes, high winds and extreme droughts.”

As the Trump administration cited wildfire mitigation as a reason to increase logging to “save communities” from wildfire, it was busy axing programs, agencies and employees who were researching or seeking ways to combat the climate crisis driving increased wildfire. Trump also declared an “energy emergency” justifying elimination of government environmental regulations on energy production.

Wildfire Science and “Mitigation”

A growing body of knowledge in fire ecology understands wildfire is a natural phenomenon that ecosystems have evolved in relation to. Trees and plants have evolved strategies for flourishing with fire — such as conifers which have serotinous cones that require fire to open them so seeds are distributed.

Fire plays a key role in ecosystem restoration. It is increasingly understood among fire ecologists that a century of fire suppression in the U.S. has failed, and has been damaging in preventing fire from playing its role in maintaining forest health.

Traditionally, Indigenous cultures in the U.S. burned the landscape to control larger, more dangerous wildfires and to generate better growing conditions for native plants they harvested. Cultural burning is credited by most scientists as well as tribes with helping maintain healthy forest ecosystems and biodiversity.

A member of the Karuk tribe in California told CalMatters “Fire, for us, is not just a tool — it’s a lifeline, a means of renewal, and a vital part of our culture.” Indigenous burning was suppressed in California and in the U.S. as a whole in the 19th century by the government as part of destruction of Native culture, theft of land and genocide.

Wildland fire is a very complex phenomenon. Different types of forests have very different fire regimes. Degrees of fire intensity differ greatly between forests and even within forests of the same general type, depending on rainfall, climate, and other factors. Historically, fire intensity varied, even within forest patches.

Decades of fire suppression by the USFS has led to a buildup of denser forests in some western dry forests. In the era of climate crisis, this has contributed to more intense and widespread fires. There is basic agreement among scientists on the role of climate change as a prime driver that must be addressed. Many agree on the need to curtail fire suppression in the backcountry to help restore the natural function of fire on the landscape. Steps here include allowing certain backcountry fires to burn and to increase prescribed burning, especially during seasons of lower fire risk.

There’s also a clear need to develop programs for home hardening, vegetation clearing near structures and better escape plans for threatened communities.

But the science on using mechanical thinning of forests to manage wildfire is not settled. There is ongoing debate about how effective it is at lowering the severity of wildfire or its threat to communities. Disagreements remain over the degree and type of thinning that should occur, where and when it should be done if at all, if it should only be undertaken in tandem with prescribed burning and whether it is beneficial or harmful to the ecosystem.

Scientists do in general agree that if done, thinning should focus on dry forests, removing smaller trees and protecting more fire-resilient older and mature trees. A USFS study showed that older forests that have been protected from logging to preserve nesting area for the northern spotted owl under the NWFP can act as “fire refugia,” burning at lower intensity than surrounding landscape. A 2016 study in Ecosphere showed forests with high levels of protection from logging in dry and mixed-conifer forests burn with lower intensity than unprotected forests or those subjected to logging, even though they generally contain more forest biomass.

Forest Service Fuel Treatment

No matter the scientific debate, the reality is that over recent decades, government policy has largely continued to rely on fire suppression. This strategy has failed to lower the risks to communities or to save forested ecosystems. At the same time, the USFS has, in recent years, begun to use thinning and prescribed burning on hundreds of thousands of acres of land each year and has plans for tens of millions more.

Environmental groups that are watching this on the ground say some mitigation projects have been done more judiciously and can be helpful, but now a great deal of USFS projects are just clear-cutting of forests to produce revenue for timber companies.

Karen Coulter of Blue Mountains Biodiversity Project (BMDP), which works to protect and restore the ecosystems of the Blue Mountains and Eastern Oregon Cascades, told Truthout she has been monitoring public lands in eastern Oregon and southwest Washington for 33 years. She said in the 1990s, average timber sales were smaller-scale, legitimate commercial thinning. “Sometimes I could agree with it. Because it was thinning from below, and it wasn’t hacking down the large trees and so forth. It was more reasonable. Now it’s virtual clear-cutting, much more intense logging, and it’s on a landscape scale.”

BMDP’s website has many photos of USFS projects termed “free selection,” “commercial” thinning or “understory removal” in the Malheur and Umatilla National Forests that are essentially clear-cuts. Everything is mowed down. Some of these include old-growth trees.

Right now, the organization is contesting a USFS project in an Inventoried Roadless Area, (public lands without roads that have high conservation value), that includes Walla Walla, Washington’s, municipal watershed and old-growth trees. They say logging here could cause damage to water quality for the city and streams that support threatened salmon, steelhead and bull trout.

Nick Cady is the legal director with Cascadia Wildlands (CW) in Eugene, Oregon. CW works to defend and restore wild ecosystems in the Pacific Northwest. Cady told Truthout that another issue is often Forest Service proposals are turned over to timber companies to execute, giving them leeway. Meanwhile, he said the BLM is “just logging as much as they can.”

Cady said of USFS “mitigation” proposals, “If you log to maximize value, you dramatically increase fire risk. That is what the data on the ground has shown time and time again…. So if you say you’re going to maximize logging to improve fire, it’s just not real.”

USFS did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication.

In Montana, the Alliance For The Wild Rockies recently sued and stopped a USFS project planning to cut and burn 15,000-45,000 acres covering the whole eastern side of the Bitterroot National Forest over 20 years, claiming “categorical exclusions” from protecting threatened species.

The amount of timber sold from logging USFS lands in the U.S. from 2014 to 2023 has varied between 2.8 and 3.2 billion board feet a year. Expanding timber production by 25 percent would increase sales to 3.75 billion board feet a year from its current 2024 level of around 3 billion board feet.

Internal USFS documents obtained by WildEarth Guardians (WEG) show top officials under both Trump and former President Joe Biden have pressured foresters to streamline the process for timber sales. At a June 2017 meeting, the USFS leadership team for the Pacific Northwest said the head of USFS was calling to “increase our restoration activities” so as to “increase acres treated and volume output as a consequence.”

USFS has also been undertaking plans to revamp the NWFP in ways that would increase the cut of older trees. One proposal would, among other things, change the age of trees protected in wet forest Late Successional Reserves from 80 to 120 years, opening up 824,000 acres to logging. WEG says this would “eviscerate the entire concept of [the reserves] which were originally intended to provide large blocks of older forests for species like the northern spotted owl.”

What’s Next?

The Trump regime now threatens to worsen the devastation of some of our most important older forests, gutting the most fire-resilient ecosystems, increasing the threat of climate change and more dangerous wildfire. It does so while slashing environmental protections across the board and gutting key agencies and programs that offer some protection to humans and the planet.

Cady and Coulter both told Truthout that the regime is going to run into all kinds of problems with accomplishing their plan — shuttered lumber mills, previous legal decisions against timber interests in court and real difficulties with the process of designing these sales after firing thousands of forest service employees.

Cady said Cascadia Wildlands has “a massive body of supporters” that can be mobilized to act regardless of decisions in the courts. He said, “People live here, they don’t want massive amounts of logging.”

In cooperation with court challenges and active public engagement by these and other groups, forest defense efforts including active tree sits have increasingly jumped off in Pacific Northwest forests recently. These include two tree sits in southern Oregon on BLM land, one of which helped precipitate a court ruling canceling logging in the Poor Windy Project in May 2024. Another tree sit has just begun to protect legacy forest on Department of Natural Resource land in Washington State near the Elwha River on the Olympic Peninsula.

Coulter said what Trump’s order is attempting “would be illegal and challenged in court, but the problem is their strategy seems to be that they could wrench these destructive timber sales through first before there’s any final legal outcome. And this is kind of what they’re doing, is wrecking everything as fast as they can, dismantling the agencies,” she said. “We need to raise the profile of the forest defense movement…. We need to raise the profile of forests, along with everything else that they’re targeting.”