Trump Logging Plan Threatens Centuries-Old Trees, Fuels Lawsuits

Visiting a freshly logged forest in western Oregon earlier this fall, retired federal wildlife surveyor Erich Reeder stepped over mangled tree roots and dead limbs scattered across a denuded slope that was once an evergreen forest. He squatted over a foot-tall Douglas fir stump to count its rings: 120 years old.

Reeder, who spent decades counting endangered species for the Bureau of Land Management, has seen centuries-old forests targeted for destruction as President Donald Trump’s administration accelerates logging on federal lands nationwide. Earlier this year, loggers cleared out most of the forest in Galagher Canyon, part of a federal timber sale an hour south of Eugene, Ore., leveling thousands of trees for lumber likely destined for new homes and other construction.

Just two miles from Galagher Canyon, in a lush remnant old-growth forest carpeted in ferns shaded by centuries-old Douglas fir trees, Reeder showed what’s at stake: The tiny tract of forest has never been logged. But it’s next in line for the ax.

“The Trump administration is ordering the last of our publicly-owned mature and old-growth forests to be cut off and sold,” Reeder, 59, said. “All of this forest—nature has been working for thousands of years to make it the way it is. There’s nothing we can do to improve it.”

Legal and political battles are heating up between Trump, who is eager to bolster the timber industry as part of his effort to create thousands of jobs and reduce the risk of wildfire, and environmentalists who are keen to protect ancient forests and the endangered wildlife that depend on them.

Congressional tree-cutting quotas, White House executive orders, and federally-mandated “emergency” measures are aiming to increase logging in federal forests at the same time as the Trump administration is weakening protections for endangered species to enable more logging and other development across the US.

At least 27 court battles over federal logging and endangered species are unfolding from California to Washington, DC. Seven cases are challenging logging in eastern states, one of which contests a plan to increase logging by more than 400% in two North Carolina national forests. In another suit, the timber industry is seeking greater access to southeast Alaska’s primeval Tongass National Forest.

A case in New Hampshire aims to block a federal agency from cutting old growth trees. An Indiana case asks a judge to require the Hoosier National Forest to protect migratory birds from logging. In November, environmental groups led by Oregon Wild and Cascadia Wildlands sparred with the Trump administration over a legal challenge to the Galagher Canyon timber sale in Oregon.

The new wave of litigation and reignited tensions are inevitable if the Trump administration aggressively permits more intense logging on federal lands, said Chris Winter, an environmental law professor at the University of Colorado Law School.

Though less than 11% of US timber comes from public land, the Trump administration wants it to drive a revival of the domestic timber industry. More logging will help rural communities, improve forest health, and cut wildfire risks, said Alyse Sharpe, spokeswoman for the land bureau, which manages 245 million acres of federal land.

Satellite images of western Oregon show a checkerboard-like pattern of blocks of mostly green public land alternating with heavily clear-cut private land. The sections of public land, Reeder says, now risk looking more like the private land.

The intense logging stands to reignite tensions simmering since the Pacific Northwest timber wars of the early 1990s, when environmentalists clashed with loggers over the fate of old-growth forests and the imperiled species that live there, especially the northern spotted owl and the marbled murrelet seabird.

Clear-cutting was curbed in the Pacific Northwest under a plan to protect the owl, but the Trump administration is revising that plan and will increase permitting a form of logging similar to clear cutting, according to the US Forest Service, which oversees 154 national forests across the country.

Ongoing lawsuits in Oregon, are a bellwether for logging challenges in the rest of the US, said Mark Miller, director of environment and natural resources litigation for the Pacific Legal Foundation, which opposes federal overreach. He said the state is becoming a “proving ground” for some of the country’s most volatile environmental issues.

“Oregon is where every national tension shows up at once,” Miller said, referencing the state’s federal forests, widespread logging, wildfire risk, and plants and animals protected under the Endangered Species Act.

Scorching Loggers’ Bottom Line

Acrimony is raw in Oregon, where loggers remain bitter about efforts to stop them. Wildfires will scorch millions of dollars worth of wood if environmentalists block timber sales, said Katie Jones, co-owner of Boulder Creek Timber Co., which bought the Galagher Canyon timber sale last year for $1.6 million.

“These guys are trying to put us out of business,” Jones said.

Cascadia Wildlands, Oregon Wild, and other environmental groups, she said, “need to be sued for the value of fighting that fire. Hold them financially responsible for the damage they have caused.”

But the latest federal timber sales are more damaging than they once were because federal agencies are shifting toward clear-cutting from a less damaging form of logging known as forest thinning, said Nick Cady, legal director for Cascadia Wildlands.

“The BLM constantly says they don’t clear-cut,” but the logging they allow looks just like it, he said. The land bureau and the Forest Service call this “regeneration harvests,” which leave some trees behind.

But intense logging techniques similar to clear-cutting “generate more timber products” and are important to control wildfire, meet Trump’s logging mandates, and keep forests economically viable, said Andy Geissler, the federal timber program director for the American Forest Resource Council, a trade group representing wood products manufacturers.

Timber companies fear wildfires will start in more flammable federal forests and spread to private ones, which they say are more likely to resist wildfires.

“Our acres don’t burn,” said Kelly Robinson, CEO of Oregon-based Stimson Lumber, which owns lands that borders federally managed forests. “Where we run into issues is when we have border properties, say, next to the Forest Service.”

However, research published by the University of Utah and Forest Service in August revealed forests managed by timber companies burn more severely in wildfires than federal forests.

Large timber companies such as Boise Cascade say they stand to benefit only marginally from Trump’s push to log more federal forests. CEO Nate Jorgensen said in an email his company has no plans of increasing production due to the logging push. About 89% of the company’s logs come from private land.

Owl vs. Loggers

It’s the smaller businesses such as Boulder Creek, whose sawmills and logging operations struggled in the wake of owl protections, that are driving Trump’s logging directives, said Doug Robertson, executive director of a group of Oregon counties whose economies depend on federal lands logging.

Loggers say their businesses were decimated after the federal government first protected the spotted owl in 1990 and created a plan to protect it in 1994, which curbed clear-cutting. They say the Biden administration added to the pain in 2021 when it vastly expanded an owl habitat designation across the Northwest—protections that remain in place under Trump.

“Since the Owl was listed as a threatened species, approximately 500 sawmills in the Pacific Coast region from the Canadian border to mid-California have been forced out of business, destroying over 33,000 mill jobs and thousands more beyond the mills,” according to the Council’s federal lawsuit filed in Washington, DC, in April challenging Biden’s owl protections.

“This case is about an agency ignoring the law” to promote flawed owl protections that are “causing devastating harm to rural, timber-dependent communities in the Pacific Northwest,” the Council argued in their lawsuit.

The US Fish and Wildlife Service, which regulates endangered and threatened species, declined to comment on its plans for Biden’s expansion of owl protections, citing pending litigation.

Conservationists in other parts of the country are watching Oregon as they fight their own battles. The Southern Environmental Law Center is challenging logging plans in two national forests in the southern Appalachian Mountains, where the Forest Service is expected to allow centuries-old trees to be cut.

“The Pacific Northwest and the Southeast are where the Forest Service goes to find timber,” said Sam Evans, a Center attorney.

Industry watchers say they expect battles to extend beyond courtrooms, including possible demonstrations from protesters converging on the century-old forests.

“If we see a lot of old growth on the chopping block, we’re going to see a lot of people in the forests trying to protect those trees,” said Winter of the University of Colorado.

The stakes for both sides are enormous, Reeder said as he peered up a 600-year-old Douglas fir in the remnant old-growth forest targeted for cutting.

“I’m afraid these efforts to log the last of our magnificent public old-growth forests will continue until the courts again prohibit them from doing so,” he said. “If, in fact, the courts do. We’ll see.”