Saw, Baby, Saw? Trump’s Emergency Threat to our Forests

It’s a classic Trumpian policy statement: Cut more trees. Think less. And remember that this is an emergency! That’s the essence of Trump administration misguided plans for our federal forests.

Two Trump executive orders to increase logging in national forests and
a memo from Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins, who oversees the United
States Forest Service (USFS), make it pretty clear. The administration wants more
logging, amounting to 25 percent more on Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management (BLM) land. It wants less thinking — or at least more streamlined thinking — about
environmental consequences or conflicts with other legally-mandated uses of the land.

The relevant agency heads have been ordered to come up with plans to increase
logging and decrease legal delays. Most of the directions contain the caveat that the
measures developed to carry out the orders shall be “consistent with applicable laws.”
But the orders also contemplate, and the administration has now proposed, changes in
some of those laws.

And, although most Americans have somehow missed it, the administration claims
we face a timber emergency, namely a timber-import emergency. In fact, one of the orders is entitled, “Addressing the Threat to National Security from Imports of Timber, Lumber.”

At one point, the executive order segues into an unfair-trade rant: “Unfair subsidies and foreign governments’ support for foreign-timber lumber, and their derivative products
necessitate action…to determine whether imports of these products threaten to impair
national security.” All this sounds like a justification to slap tariffs on wood products from
those “hostile” Canadians. This is nothing new: Americans have been whining about Canadian competition for more than a century.

New or not, some people find the executive orders legally dubious and disturbing. “If realized,” the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) has said, “these actions [called for by the executive orders] will pollute watersheds, increase wildfire impacts on communities,
worsen air quality, and degrade forest ecosystems, all while further isolating the United
States from more sustainability-oriented global markets and undermining the country’s
status as a global leader.” NRDC senior attorney Garrett Rose adds, “It will do all this, so it can feed the public’s forests to industry’s chainsaws.”

But let’s not overthink this. Some see the orders as another way to reward supporters and donors. “Mostly,” argues Kristen Boyles, managing attorney of Earthjustice’s Northwestern office, this seems to be “the Trump administration paying off its supporters.” The administration looks like it’s just “going down the list” of payoffs. “It’s so clearly a gift of public resources to private entities so they can make a buck.”

Conservation Northwest executive director Mitch Friedman suggests that the orders may not amount to anything on the ground. Neither he nor Kristen Boyles sounds particularly worried. Pruning regulation and felling trees on the scale that the Trump orders contemplate won’t be a slam-dunk. The path to more logging runs through a tangled thicket of laws and regulations — which is to say, the path would run through a lot of courtrooms.

Boyles notes that “executive orders aren’t laws,” and that one of the relevant laws, the
National Forest Management Act (NFMA), requires public lands to be managed for
multiple uses, including wildlife habitat and public recreation, and that this legal
requirement is incorporated into all the nation’s 150-odd individual forest plans. The NFMA also requires such a requirement.

And there are other laws, too. That list includes the Endangered Species Act (ESA); the
National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which was sponsored by Washington Sen. Henry M. Jackson; the Multiple Use Sustained Yield Act; the Federal Land Policy and Management ACT; and the Administrative Procedure Act. Lastly, there’s the Northwest Forest Plan that Bill Clinton enacted.

To do what Trump wants would either take new legislation and years of plan revisions or,
Boyles says, “you would have to violate all these laws.” This doesn’t prevent the
administration from trying to undercut the laws. Trump has proposed a new rule under
which the ESA would no longer prevent destruction of an endangered or threatened
species’ habitat, the places in which that species lives. The result: no habitat, no
species. And evidently, for this administration, no species, no problem.

Trump’s orders offer a solution in search of a problem. They reflect, and stoke, nostalgia for an economy that’s not coming back. Like many other things the administration has done, the orders are also a kind of political theater, designed to show contempt for people and values his base doesn’t like. In effect, screw the trees, and screw the tree-huggers.

And one more claim is adduced: using forests to sequester carbon. (Are you kidding? Climate change is just “a hoax.”)

In Brooke Rollins’ memo about our forest crisis, she said the “crisis” was “due to
uncharacteristically severe wildfires, insect and disease outbreaks, invasive species.”
She didn’t mention climate change as a contributor to all these problems, much less
suggest any effort to deal with it, which would have been heresy in Trumpland. Our EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has said, “we are driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate-change religion.”

Laws aren’t the only barriers between Trump’s orders and achieved reality. “It would take federal money to do all these things,” Boyles notes. In fact, Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure legislation provided $3.3 billion for wildfire-risk reduction and pay increases for federal wildland firefighters. Beyond that, the feds have always subsidized private industry’s logging of public trees, particularly by building roads into the forests.

More logging would presumably require the construction of more roads. It would also
require mills that don’t currently exist — and workers who don’t currently exist. If new U.S production were made profitable by tariffs on Canadian forest products, lumber prices would go up, not down, which is the point of keeping a high tariff on cheaper imports from Canada.

Meanwhile, there’s plenty of available timber. “There’s no logging emergency,” Boyles
says. To pretend otherwise “is like claiming you have an energy emergency [which
Trump has done], when there’s no energy emergency.” (It’s also like claiming
there’s an invasion, multiple invasions from Latin America, in order to deploy the 1798
Enemy Aliens Act to deport people without due process.)

“Trump declared eight national emergencies in his first hundred days,” historian Jill
Lepore has written in The New Yorker, “declarations that allowed him to wield more than
130 emergency powers. . . . Trump’s second Administration marks the high noon of the emergency Presidency.”

Trump’s “emergency” assault on the nation’s forests may be new. But the ideas and lurking benefits behind it certainly aren’t. Trump’s logging push “seems like going back in time,” Boyles says. Indeed it does. So let’s peer back in time.

Early in this century, when the George W. Bush administration also tried to jack up timber production on federal forests — and, as Trump is doing, dressed up this scam as a concern for preventing wildfire and improving forest health.

Needless to say, the Trump administration isn’t willing to follow its professed concern
with forest health and wildfire to its logical conclusions. Secretary of Agriculture Rollins
has lined up behind Trump with a memo establishing an “emergency-situation
declaration” for more than 112 million acres of national forests.

The memo explains that “National Forests are in crisis due to uncharacteristically severe wildfires, insect and disease outbreaks, invasive species, and other stressors whose impacts have been compounded by too little active management. . . These threats — combined with overgrown forests — a growing number of homes in the wildland-urban interface, and more than a century of rigorous fire suppression — have all contributed to what is now a full-blown wildfire and forest health crisis.”

These problems have been recognized for many years. The Biden Administration secured billions of dollars to tackle them, and there’s still a lot of work to be done. Rollins’ memorandum talks about the “uncharacteristically severe wildfires, insect and disease outbreaks, invasive species, and other stressors” without mentioning climate change, which is making all those very real problems steadily worse. How do you solve a real problem if you won’t even mention the reality that underlies it?

There would be nothing wrong with the administration’s concern for the health of
American forests — if it were genuine rather than a misleading rationale. And there’s nothing wrong with a desire to speed up bureaucratic processes. (You don’t have to be a MAGA believer to think the wheels of government grind a good deal too slowly.)

Historically, the national forests were created by people who worried about the
consequences of too much logging rather than too little. The titans of the early
Northwest lumber industry moved to the Pacific Northwest after they had basically cut
their way through the forests of the upper Midwest. They realized that axes and crosscut saws could destroy a forest — and that once a forest land was cleared and used for something else, it was gone essentially forever.

In the West around the same time, under Presidents Harrison and Cleveland Congress set aside forest reserves, which eventually became national forests, because of a concern for their long-term future. The crucial Organic Act of 1897 stated that the reserves had been established “to improve and protect the forest within the reservation, … securing favorable conditions of water flows, and to furnish a continuous supply of timber for the use and necessities of citizens of the United States.” The Act was signed by Trump’s favorite tariff guy, William McKinley.

But the public forests first set aside in the late 1800s weren’t where the main action was. They were basically what was left over after private industry had corralled (in some cases basically stole) the best timber on the most accessible land. The public wound up with what was left.

That maneuver attracted little interest until the end of World War 2, when much of the timber on private land had been felled. Weyerhaeuser started the first commercial tree farm in 1941. After the war, with a heavy demand for wood, log trucks started going into the national forests. By the 1970s, logging in national forests became a big environmental issue. People could see massive clearcuts from highways and railroads, and they didn’t like them.

A committee chaired by the Forest Service’s senior wildlife biologist, Jack Ward Thomas, recommended setting aside millions of acres of habitat. The owl was listed as threatened, not endangered. Environmentalists sued. A federal court found that the government was violating the National Forest Management Act by not protecting the owl and halted all new timber sales in federal forests that contained spotted-owl habitat. The “spotted owl wars” were on.

Bill Clinton campaigned for President in 1992 with a promise to bring the fighting to an
end, which he did. In 1994, Clinton’s administration came out with a Northwest Forest
Plan that protected habitat for spotted owls, marbled murrelets, (which had also been listed by then), and a host of other species found in the region’s old-growth forests. There were dire predictions of an economic blow to the region. Both environmental and industry groups sued to block the plan from taking effect. They lost.

The court blessed the Forest Plan and lifted the injunction. Economically, as a group of
economists observed, the sky didn’t fall. Individual people and small communities felt the effects of decreased logging, but the region didn’t even blink. Environmentally, the spotted owl fared much worse than people had hoped. Past and ongoing habitat destruction didn’t help, nor did the greater-than-expected invasion of non-native barred owls, which literally have been eating the spotted owls’ lunch.

And the trees? A lot are still there – certainly a lot more than there would have been if
without the Northwest Forest Plan had never existed. But the protection of old growth was never absolute. Reserve areas stood within a “matrix” within which logging was permitted. And scams of the sort that the Bush administration tried early in this century and the Trump administration is trying now, have always been with us.

Ink on the Forest Plan was barely dry before Washington’s Sen. Slade Gorton sponsored a “salvage rider” to a continuing resolution that kept the government funded, allowing “salvage logging” of any trees threatened by fire or insects plus any trees associated with them. In other words, for a limited time, say “salvage” and you could cut whatever you pleased.

The Trump team evidently likes the Salvage Rider as an historical precedent to be
emulated (rather like it evidently regards the disastrous Smoot-Hawley Tariff). One executive order says the Secretary of the Interior “shall consider a new categorical
exclusion [from requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act] for timber
thinning and re-establish a categorical exclusion for timber-salvage activities.” When the Salvage Rider was brand-new, the Clinton White House at first claimed not to know exactly what the President had signed. Gorton said the White House had been fully informed. All of which set the stage for George W. Bush.

Bush took office relatively soon after the Northwest Forest Plan ended the Owl War. Some things still seemed to be up in the air. But, Boyles says, “we’re 20 years past that now.”
Or at least we should be.

Let’s suppose that tariffs kept cheaper Canadian forest products out and the U.S. actually did increase production on federal land by 25 percent. What then? Lumber prices and therefore housing construction costs would jump upward, and the federal forests would not produce a torrent of new wood. “Most timber harvesting in the United States is conducted on public lands,” the Congressional Research Service (CRS) has observed. In 2012, the CRS said, “90 percent of wood and paper products in the United States originated on private lands.”

So now, let’s do the math. If Trump policies increase the 10 percent cut on federal land
by 25 percent, the resulting increase of American wood production would be — a
whopping 2.5 percent. In exchange for what consequences and costs? Don’t bother the
administration with questions like that. Meanwhile the administration sheds crocodile tears over forest health.

There’s nothing new about using forest health or the prevention of wildfire as an excuse
to cut more healthy trees Indeed, the Bush administration’s push for more logging came in the form of a “Healthy forsts” initiative. Nobody seemed to have been fooled then. Will anyone be fooled now?

The Bush administration could point to major wildfires in Oregon as a justification for its
forest policy proposals. The Trump administration can point to the recent fires in Los
Angeles. Those fires may give some surface plausibility to the claims about logging as
wildfire prevention. But of course those fires, like others in southern California, torched
grass and chapparal, not trees. Friedman notes that fires in grass and chaparral — or in
managed corporate tree plantations — have often been used to justify more cutting in
healthy forests.

Thinning tends to be such an economic loser because you can’t haul small trees and combustible brush very far at a profit. Friedman says the best we can do in most places would be to thin the forest, then just burn the thinnings. In fact, there’s reason to believe that the most effective and economical approach might be to just burn all that potential wildfire fuel, period — which is what tribes did for millennia.

Unfortunately, current political and economic conditions don’t allow that, since no one
would accept the resulting smoke near populated areas. Of course, populated areas
have been spreading for years into places that are also fire-prone, and you can’t just let
it burn in the “Wildland-Urban Interface” (WUI). Rollins’ memo points to the “growing number of homes in the wildland-urban interface” also a long-recognized problem — without pointing out that building permits and zoning regulations are the province of local governments unwilling, much less suggesting any way to pressure those governments into giving up their expanding tax bases in order to protect revenues generated by homes and homeowners on the margins of flammable wildlands.

Nor does Rollins note that the Interior Department has proposed putting federal land in 10-mile swaths of federal land around communities of more than 5,000 people into the hands of local governments and private developers, so that the number of homes in the
WUI can presumably grow. So those houses will keep going up on the land, in or near the forest — or chapparal — and be at risk of going up in flames, forcing fire fighters to risk their lives to save buildings that really shouldn’t be there. This won’t change any time soon.

Do we just need to step back and let trees grow? Not at all. Friedman says we need “a
Marshall Plan for reforestation.” But will an increase in commercial logging help solve
the obvious problems with forest health or with continued building in the WUI? No way.
As Friedman says, “logging doesn’t fix anything.”