The Department of Agriculture (USDA) issued a memo on Friday allowing the use of more than 112 million acres of national forests for logging to increase timber production and reduce wildfire risk.
Rollins stated that the national forests are in crisis due to “uncharacteristically severe wildfires, insect and disease outbreaks, invasive species, and other stressors.”
Those threats—combined with overgrown forests, the growing number of homes in the wildland-urban interface, and decades of rigorous fire suppression—have contributed to a “full-blown wildfire” and “forest health crisis,” according to the memo.
The emergency designation would allow the Forest Service to expedite approval for logging activity in the designated forests, bypassing the usual processes required under national environmental laws.
The memo directs Forest Service personnel to increase timber production by 25 percent over the next four to five years, while also meeting the minimum requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act and other environmental laws.
French called on regional foresters “to the maximum extent practicable, use existing and new categorical exclusions for timber stand improvement, salvage, and other site preparation activities for reforestation, consistent with applicable law.”
Environmental group Earthjustice has rejected the USDA’s emergency designation.
Miller-McFeeley said that cutting down trees that currently serve as “important buffers against climate change” will not help to reduce the threat of wildfires, and that it could cause “significant harm” to forest ecosystems and negatively impact the outdoor recreation economy.
Trump stated that the country’s abundance of timber resources is “more than adequate” to meet domestic needs, but that “heavy-handed Federal policies have prevented full utilization of these resources” and caused it to rely on imported lumber.
“It is vital that we reverse these policies and increase domestic timber production to protect our national and economic security,” Trump stated in his order issued on March 1.
His second order states that the United States’ softwood lumber industry has the practical production capacity to meet 95 percent of its softwood consumption last year. Despite this capacity, the country has been a net importer of lumber since 2016, it stated.
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 clear-cutting 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.