Trump’s Executive Order on Forests ‘A Devastating Blow,’ Activists Say

Environmentalists say increasing timber production will harm the climate and environment and could worsen wildfire risk.

President Donald Trump’s new executive order to increase domestic timber production could have a disastrous impact on climate change, endangered species and local economies dependent on ecotourism, conservation groups warned.

The order, issued over the weekend, claims that “heavy-handed Federal policies” have “prevented full utilization” of the nation’s timber resources and aims to ramp up production of lumber, timber and paper by expediting permitting processes, including requirements set under the Endangered Species Act. 

Danna Smith, executive director at Dogwood Alliance, a North Carolina-based nonprofit that works to protect Southern forests, said the executive order could be catastrophic for combating both climate change and its consequences. 

“This is absolutely the wrong direction and a devastating blow,” she said. “Standing forests are vital to fighting the climate crisis. They pull carbon out of the atmosphere and store it, and they help protect and buffer against the worst impacts of climate change, like flooding and wildfire.” She spoke as wildfires raged in North Carolina and South Carolina, and as North Carolina continued to recover from the destruction caused by flooding from Hurricane Helene. “They are so essential to our ability to buffer the impacts of more intense weather.”

She added: “When forests are logged, those values are diminished and taken away, and carbon goes into the atmosphere. If you’re going to increase logging, you’re going to increase carbon emissions.” 

In a statement to Inside Climate News, a U.S. Department of Agriculture spokesperson said Secretary Brooke Rollins “fully supports” the president’s efforts to increase timber production “across national forests nationwide.”

“Providing a sustainable supply of domestic timber has been one of the core missions of the USDA Forest Service since its inception 120 years ago,” the spokesperson said. The USDA “will continue to meet its commitments to protecting vulnerable wildlife” while fulfilling Trump’s goals of providing “abundant domestic timber.” The agency did not respond when asked about the impact on climate change.

The Federal Forest Resource Coalition, a trade association for companies that harvest and manufacture wood products from federal lands, cheered the order in a statement on Monday. “The President’s Executive Order rightly recognizes that our National Forests are undermanaged and can do a lot more to meet the demand for lumber in the U.S.,” the group said.

This mandate comes at a moment when the Trump administration is laying off people en masse from multiple agencies, including thousands from the U.S. Forest Service. At the same time, the Forest Service recently named Tom Schultz as its new chief. Schultz was formerly an executive at the Idaho Forest Group, a large lumber producer.

Anna Medema, the associate director of legislative and administrative advocacy for forests and public lands at the Sierra Club, said increasing timber production would likely target the larger, older trees that are the most critical to protect as climate change accelerates. 

“The climate impacts are huge,” she said. “These trees are the most important trees to leave standing, both for climate resilience, but also for wildfire resilience.” 

Nick Pevzner, an assistant professor in landscape architecture and regional planning at the University of Pennsylvania, recently worked on a project examining forest management, wildfires and carbon in the American West. He said the effects of the executive order all come down to how its directives are interpreted by forest managers in an increasingly strapped agency. 

That’s particularly true when it comes to wildfire risk, something the order repeatedly mentions as a justification for increasing timber production.

Parts of the order could “potentially support some of the ongoing forest management and forest restoration work that is already happening” and is needed to help prevent wildfire disasters, Pevzner said. 

But, he added, “from a fire resilience perspective, it’s much more important to take out the small trees and leave the big ones, as opposed to the more lucrative approach of taking the big ones.”

“If it’s just about accelerating logging with no consideration of the long-term biodiversity or climate or forest health or forest structural demands, then it could be incredibly harmful,” he said. “It’s putting a lot of pressure on the forest managers to make recommendations extremely quickly, which is not a great recipe for careful and sound forest management.” 

Any opportunities for reform are “contradicted by the recent firings at the U.S. Forest Service,” Pevzner said, “which are actually removing the capacity to do the kind of forest management that this order is trying to accelerate.” 

Smith, with Dogwood Alliance, said the economic benefits of outdoor recreation far outweigh the benefits of the logging industry for rural communities that rely on forests for tourism. And she questioned the order’s assertion that “onerous Federal policies” have forced the U.S. to rely on foreign timber and lumber imports. 

“The U.S. is already in the top three countries in terms of how much wood we produce. The southeastern U.S. is the world’s largest wood-producing region,” she said. “We’re importing a very little amount of wood overall relative to our nation’s consumption.” 

Even without an increase, industrial logging already contributes significantly to carbon emissions, especially in states like North Carolina. Smith said industrial logging is the third-largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions in North Carolina, and that’s in addition to environmental impacts like habitat loss. 

“Standing forests provide so many benefits, and when they are logged, those benefits don’t exist for a very long time,” Smith said. “After a forest is logged, it takes a very long time for a forest to grow back.”

Smith saw hope in recent nationwide demonstrations protesting cuts and firings at the National Park Service and the U.S. Forest Service. “People are really connected to their local places and their local forests,” she said. “I think the administration is going to see a big movement that comes in the wake of this executive order of people standing up to protect our forests.”

Cover photo:  A lumber company in Preston Hollow, N.Y. receives a delivery of timber on March 28, 2023. Credit: Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images