Trump’s Changes to What Harms Species Adds Risk in Logging Areas

The Trump administration’s pending deletion of the Endangered Species Act’s definition of “harm” will have an outsize impact on imperiled species in Northwest forests targeted for logging, especially the northern spotted owl, environmental attorneys say.

Habitat for several species, including the threatened owl and the endangered marbled murrelet seabird, overlap with federally-managed forests in Oregon, Washington, and California, where logging is expected to increase under White House emergency orders and a new law that requires a roughly 75% increase in timber harvesting in national forests by 2034.

“Without adequate, suitable places to live and reproduce, species go extinct,” said Melinda Taylor, senior lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law. “Repealing the definition of harm would undermine almost all of the regulatory framework in place to protect endangered species.”

Once the repeal is finalized, logging will be considered harmful to the marbled murrelet and northern spotted owl only if they’re roosting in trees at the moment they’re being cut, said Sandi Snodgrass, partner at Holland & Hart LLP in Denver.

The change would affect developers nationwide because they may no longer need permits to modify habitat for an imperiled species in the way of development, including mining.

This “reflects a fundamental shift in how the ESA has been implemented for decades,” Snodgrass said, adding that companies required to comply with ESA regulations will welcome the changes because there will be fewer endangered species consultations to conduct and fewer federal permits to obtain.

The US Fish and Wildlife Service in 1981 defined “harm” under the ESA as any action that hurts or kills species, including modifying or degrading an imperiled species’ habitat. The agency proposed in April to fully delete that definition without replacing it because it said prohibiting habitat degradation isn’t the “best reading” of the law, the first of several proposals to roll back ESA regulations. The repeal will relieve the economic burden businesses face in complying with the current rule, the proposal says.

Once the definition is gone, the ESA would regulate only direct physical harm to protected plants and animals, and environmental groups are expected to challenge the rollback in court.

Habitat destruction is the primary cause of endangered species decline and it’s fundamentally harmful because the species need a place to live to survive, Taylor said.

Under the current definition, “the mere threat of any habitat modification immediately triggers” a consultation with the Fish and Wildlife Service, adding “additional time to a lengthy permitting process,” the National Mining Association said in May comments about the repeal submitted to the agency.

A federal timber sale on Bureau of Land Management land in Oregon in October 2025.

Photographer: Bobby Magill/Bloomberg Law

Relying on Old Growth

Timber sales have jumped in spotted owl and marbled murrelet habitat, especially in Oregon, where the Bureau of Land Management sells the most timber. There, timber sales increased by 20% in fiscal 2025 over 2024, and 30% nationwide, nearly returning to levels last seen in 2020 after a dip during the Biden administration, according to bureau data. US Forest Service data for all of fiscal 2025 isn’t yet posted.

The marbled murrelet and northern spotted owl are especially vulnerable to increased logging because both rely on old forests to survive.

The marbeled murrelet is a robin-sized seabird that nests in ancient forests near the Pacific coast. The Service estimates murrelet populations are relatively stable, totaling about 19,000 in the Northwest.

Northern spotted owl populations have declined by about 70% since 1990, according to a Service 2021 estimate. The biggest threats are habitat loss and competition from invasive barred owls.

The spotted owl is most protected from the barred owl in large areas of old-growth forests, said Daniel C. Donato, a natural resource scientist at the Washington Department of Natural Resources. The 1994 Northwest Forest Plan, which protected spotted owl habitat in California, Oregon, and Washington national forests, successfully stabilized populations because it decreased the rate at which old-growth forests were being logged, he said.

In the face of barred owl competition, spotted owl habitat is critical to its survival, he said. “If you have no habitat, you have no hope of having spotted owl,” he said.

The Service declined to comment, citing pending litigation. The Bureau of Land Management didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The American Forest Resource Council is suing the Service to lift the Biden administration’s expanded habitat definition for the northern spotted owl, which includes an area of Northwest forests twice the size of New Jersey.

A ‘Weaponized’ Law

The timber industry is pushing hard for the rollback in the Pacific Northwest, where it says wildfire threats call for more logging to reduce risk.

The ESA has been “weaponized” to block logging as a way to manage forests, said Amanda Sullivan-Aster, forest policy manager for the Association of Oregon Loggers. “We really have a forest health crisis and a wildfire crisis that we are trying to deal with,” and over-regulation has hampered the industry’s ability to help solve the problem, she said.

Spotted owl protections have cost logging companies more than $1.3 billion in lost revenue because they couldn’t cut trees in woods considered owl habitat, the Council said in comments the wood products industry trade group submitted to the Service.

The Council said rescinding the “harm” definition should allow the US Forest Service to avoid relying on previous interpretations of the ESA when the agency updates the Northwest Forest Plan.

The Biden administration drafted an update, but the Forest Service says it will revisit it and issue a new one late in 2026.

Even though the Northwest Forest Plan helped to stabilize spotted owl habitat, agencies still allowed some logging that killed some owls, and the Trump administration’s rollbacks are likely to lead to more loss, said Susan Jane Brown, an attorney at Silvix Resources, an Oregon-based nonprofit environmental law firm.

“The new regulations, which are even more permissive, are likely to going to make it even harder to stop the slide towards extinction for numerous species of iconic wildlife,” she said.