Back on March 1, President Trump fired a double-barrel shotgun at the long-held preservationist U.S. mantra that for nearly a century has dealt heavy blows to American forests, forest animals, and the humans whose homes abut government forest lands.
They first addressed what the White House calls “the threat to national security from imports of timber and lumber.” Even though the U.S. has ample timber resources, the nation has been a net importer of lumber since 2016. “Wood products,” said the President, play “a vital role in key downstream civilian industries, including construction.”
Reliance on imported lumber became critical during the COVID pandemic when the producer price of softwood veneer and plywood manufacturing over tripled from $205 in January 2020 to $702 in June 2021; the December 2024 price was still higher than the pre-COVID peak.
That upward jerk devastated the home-building industry. Contractors who had hoped construction prices would return to pre-pandemic levels are still waiting, and the short-term effects of the Trump tariffs could keep prices high for months to come.
On the other hand, Trump’s second order, a call for the immediate expansion of U.S. timber production, provides hope to the logging and construction industries and home buyers. The order also returns to the wisdom of indigenous communities, who managed American forests with fire for millennia.
Logging and controlled burns have been under attack since the Wilsonian “Progressive” Era. Progressive federal and state government policies restricting common-sense logging and fuel breaks led to overgrown forests that quickly burn out of control. The result is ever-increasing threats to property, human and animal lives, and environmental damage, including air pollution, water pollution, and loss of habitat and species.
The market-focused environmental nonprofit PERC urges the nation to “Fix America’s Forests,” which are “in trouble” thanks to a century of fire suppression that has disrupted natural fire cycles and impaired forest health.. Trees die in national forests from insect infestations, drought, and disease caused by overly dense forests.
To “fix” our forests, PERC (Property and Environment Research Center) called for active forest management, including prescribed fires and mechanical thinning. Overlapping regulations, litigation, and inadequate funds for proper management have left our forests vulnerable. PERC’s solution is to reduce existing regulatory hurdles and find more creative funding approaches.
Keith Schneider of the water newsroom Circle of Blue says Trump’s forest management plan boosts logging on federal lands, increases tariffs on Canadian lumber, and expedites timber approvals to reduce wildfire risks and support the U.S. timber industry.
“The White House,” says Schneider, contends, “Our inability to fully exploit our domestic timber supply has impeded the creation of jobs and prosperity, contributed to wildfire disasters, degraded fish and wildlife habitats, increased the cost of construction and energy, and threatened our economic security.”
To oversee this dramatic change in federal forest policy, Trump appointed widely respected forestry expert Tom Schultz to head the Forest Service. One of his tasks will be to enable shorter timeframes for evaluating logging plans for their impact on endangered species.
Well-funded environmental groups immediately claimed that the Trump policy increases the human imprint on “sacred” forest lands. Inside Climate News called the order “an assault on the nation’s public forests” that “removes protections” and will surely destroy massive swaths of older, fire-resilient trees.
Danna Smith, executive director at North Carolina’s Dogwood Alliance, called the Trump order “absolutely the wrong direction and a devastating blow.” Even as wildfires raged in the Carolinas, killing trees and wildlife, Smith claimed that selective logging and removal of dead trees would harm “standing forests” that are vital to fighting the climate crisis.
The irony appears lost to those clinging to the failed federal policy of yesteryear’s progressives.
This is not Trump’s first rodeo with forest management. His January 2019 order required the Interior and Agriculture Departments to collaborate with state, tribal, and local partners to create a comprehensive wildfire strategy to prioritize highest-risk lands. That order sought to reduce hazardous fuel loads, mitigate fire risk, and ensure the safety and stability of local communities.
The mantra – then as now – was “active forest management.”
Two years later, Interior Secretary David Bernhardt announced that Interior had reduced wildfire risk across 1.5 million acres in fiscal year 2020. The four-year total of 5.4 million acres was 49% higher than during Obama’s second term.
The Department of the Interior’s record included offering 763 board feet of timber for sale, addressing non-native and invasive species across over a million acres, protecting water quality and mitigating flooding and erosion risks from wildfires on 1.7 million acres, and reducing fuel loads on 1.5 million acres. They also maintained public access roads to provide access for emergency services and restoration work across 20,000 miles.
In April 2020, Bernhardt signed a final decision to construct and maintain a system of up to 11,000 miles of strategically placed fuel breaks to control wildfires within 223 million acres of federal lands in Western states. The Bureau of Land Management had assessed more than 1,400 fuel breaks since 2002 and determined that 79% were effective in controlling wildfires and 84% helped change fire behavior for the better.
An early test of the Trump forest policy is playing out in fire-ravaged San Bernardino, thanks to an emergency order issued by Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins to increase timber quotas in America’s national forests by 25%. Opponents scoffed that “they are after timber.” Still, according to the U.S. Forest Service, charred portions of the forest burned in the Eaton Fire remain at “significant” risk of debris flows, flooding, and mudslides.
Rollins says that streamlining permits for increased logging will help “achieve relief from threats to public health and safety, critical infrastructure, and/or mitigation of threats to natural resources.” The result will be improved durability, resilience, and resistance to fire, insects, and disease within national forests and grasslands.
And maybe increasing domestic logging will help revive an American industry as old as America itself.
This article originally appeared at Townhall
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The DOE had reduced wildfire risk across 1.5 million acres in fiscal year 2020.
Oh, jolly. That’s 0.3 percent of the timberlands of the U.S.A. An imperceptible nibble. There’s one heck of a lot more ‘reducing’ to do – and they weren’t clear how effective it was, either.
You don’t need to reduce fire risk across the entire forest. First address areas near houses and infrastructure. That’s what they did in Botania, Chile, and a massive forest fire simply stopped before it reached them. “Despite being surrounded by fire, amidst the voracious chain of fires that in early February claimed the lives of 132 people in the Valparaíso region, the Botania neighborhood in Chile remained intact: the flames did not touch any of the houses“. And what about the places that didn’t prepare? – “250 houses in Canal Chacao – out of a total of just over 1,000 – were razed by the fire, almost all bordering on private land where owners resisted vegetation pruning.“.
Yes we do need to reduce the hazard across the entire forest. Why would a million acre megafire that incinerates tens of billions of board feet, all the wildlife, and pollutes the watershed be acceptable if it didn’t burn a town down?
From the post you are responding to.
“First address areas near houses and infrastructure”
Nobody said anything about ignoring the rest of the forest.
” An imperceptible nibble.”???
Fires are a natural process.
Fires have been a thing long before humans were a thing. Yet there’s still abundant wildlife and watersheds. Funny how they didn’t get destroyed.
Suing some obstructionist regulators, like CARB, would help.
Changing the rules so green NGOs have to post appropriate bonds when they intervene to block forest management would deal with the real problem, management by judges and green NGOs.
Grok said: Rule 65(c) states that a court may issue a preliminary injunction or TRO “only if the movant gives security in an amount that the court considers proper to pay the costs and damages sustained by any party found to have been wrongfully enjoined or restrained.”
Now that we have solved air and water pollution issues in the US, the biggest environmental issue is fuel loading in semi-arid forests.
it has been many years since I have worked on the topic but I do not think much has changed. So I will just throw this out for discussion.
The relatively small population who live in these areas have little political clout but know what needs to be done to protect their environment. However, ‘environmentalists’ who live in cesspools like NYC and LA know what is best and fund groups like the Sierra Club. They block attempts to manage the forest by removing dead and overgrown trees.
The results are tragic in loss of life caused be fires. It is less tragic but the intense fires kill the forest resulting in huge environmental issues.
Forest management could certainly be improved throughout the U.S. However, calling NYC and LA “cesspools” does not advance the cause, any more than city folk calling country folk “hicks” or “rednecks.”
They are cesspools, get over it.
It helps to identify the problem. It is understandable that people who live in a cesspool thin k the environment is going to hell. For recreation, they go to the forest and chain themselves to a tree.
Now that I am retired I am a resident of Washington State. You have people in Seattle telling the state how to live.
I am enjoying a wood campfire one morning where I hear a passer by comment that ‘some idiot does not the governor has banned open fires’.
That is correct! I did not know what the idiot governor had proclaimed. Earlier in the year, I had twice prepared to leave my camp site because of wild fires.
I was in a different part of the state. I was then in the rain forest part of the state. About 100 feet to the east was Greys Harbor and a mile west of the Pacific Ocean.
In different parts of the state the trees are different. Fire is a natural part of the environment and clean the forest. However many years of the practice of fighting the fires have left first with too much material to burn. When fire gets to the crowns of the trees, the large trees are killed. And anything that gets in the way.
Over the past eons, forests have burned down and regrown. It is all part of a natural cycle.
Managing the forests such that the fires, and the will still continue to happen, do not cause devastation to populated areas.
Not debating. Your points are spot on.
Just a clarification. While we have solved all the known air and water pollution issues, that does not mean there could be (not CO2) new issues.
As new products, processes, chemicals, etc. are introduced as technology evolves, it is possible we may find a new issue.
Also, while most or all are identifies, we still have spills (accidental or intentional) that required cleanup. This is an ongoing process that fortunately does not have a heavy work load in terms of quantity. Raw sewage and industry chemicals spilled into water ways from with potable water is extracted happens from time to time.
“Danna Smith, executive director at North Carolina’s Dogwood Alliance, called the Trump order “absolutely the wrong direction and a devastating blow.” Even as wildfires raged in the Carolinas, killing trees and wildlife, Smith claimed that selective logging and removal of dead trees would harm “standing forests” that are vital to fighting the climate crisis.”
That is idiotic. Does this person have anything close to a STEM degree?
Cutting lumber for homes actually sequesters the CO2 input that made all of the cellulose and lignin. The lumber in my house is over 100 years old. I work hard to make sure none of it is decomposing. That CO2 is locked up in my house. (Of course, I do not think it is important to sequester CO2, and I think lumber has been a magical material for advancing human civilization.)
Letting a forest grow and then die and rot in place does NOT sequester the carbon. It is also MUCH more likely to suffer a devastating forest fire compared to tree plantations where they mulched all of the previous slash.
These people know nothing at all about the topics for which they claim to be experts. Further, I suspect their Alliance runs on a crap ton of government largesse since they produce no value.
Agreed. You beat me to the punch. “Even as wildfires raged in the Carolinas, killing trees and wildlife, Smith claimed that selective logging and removal of dead trees would harm “standing forests” that are vital to fighting the climate crisis.”
This claim on her part is ridiculous and absurd demonstrating she knows little about this topic she professes to know and understand. Maybe she can explain why home insurance in these forested areas have gone through the roof. It’s rather obvious. Poor forest management has created an untenable situation where these fires become catastrophic no matter how diligent a homeowner is in creating “defensible space” around their property.
We had 5 acres in the mountains of CO and despite my efforts to mitigate our property neighbors who don’t left me with the feeling that it may not be enough. We watched a forest fire from our home which was a humbling experience and for those in the fire zone not so much.
The local volunteer fire department explained the challenge was getting to the fire location to fight it.
All one has to do is hike the forested areas and you can see the density of the forest and the dead trees many from previous beetle damage.
Funny how those stands of trees that are vital to fighting the climate crisis went up in flames adding CO2 and no longer in the fight.
How can a person not recognize their self-contradictory rhetoric?
Dana Smith is a lawyer, but the Alliance has an amazing number of employees, most are women and most are people of color. They run on grants and their focus is nominally southern forests. It is simply stunning how much wealth a capitalist society produces to support groups like this who mostly produce only “statements”. Professional yappers. Most hold a degree of some sort. A few hold degrees in some sort of environmental topic, but are likely pretty soft degrees as they all have some intersection with racial/environmental justice.
Is it any wonder how we have accumulated so much national debt?
Part of the issue in regards to enhancing/restarting the lumber processing industry has been/might still be the direct sale of unprocessed American logs to foreign countries, where they are shipped to be milled there, or saved for future use by placing in cold, fresh water for future processing -purchased when prices are lowest. POTUS might cause a mandate where American logs harvested from federal lands are required to be at least minimally milled or otherwise processed into finished products in-country prior to sale outside of the country. That would for sure jump start the lumber industry!
Export of Fed logs has been banned since the 1980’s. Also banned is substitution: purchasers of Fed timber may not export their private land logs. That’s why some large forest land owning companies do not purchase Fed timber sales; they prefer to export their private logs.
Trump did express a desire to see the domestic furniture business grow.
Not sure what this got a down vote.
It is an exploratory comment.
Trump’s March 1st EO, Immediate Expansion of American Timber Production, is a good sound bite, but it lacks the teeth to get the job done. Check the wording. What the EO calls for is “new or updated guidance regarding tools to facilitate increased timber production”, “a strategy” under Sec 7 of the ESA, “a plan” that sets timber harvest goals, and “categorical exclusions” to NEPA.
None of this is new, and none of it addresses the real problem: decades of systemic anti-logging policies in the USFS coupled with environmental lawsuits. You might call it the enviro-industrial complex, multi-billion dollar sue-happy NGO’s and a captured Deep State agency.
The US Forest Service owns 193 million acres of forest. The Bureau of Land Management owns 247 million acres but very little of that is forested. The USFS is the only agency that could significantly increase timber production.
The most productive forestland in the US is in the Pacific Northwest. There (here) 24,000,000 acres of prime high site USFS forest has been locked up for 30 years in the Clinton/Gore NW Forest Plan. That land holds $2.4 trillion in timber today and is capable of producing $50 billion per year in perpetuity. None of it will be logged with Trump’s EO. None of it was logged in his first term despite EO’s then.
Bottom line: Congress must act by 1) eliminating the NW Forest Plan, 2) rewriting NEPA to end constant litigation, and 3) rewriting the ESA to eliminate fake species and “population segments”. Trump should push them to do these things, but Congress today is a spineless uni-party that won’t act unless members are replaced by competent conservatives.
Excellent comment. I hope Trump’s people read it.
But spotted owls!
A journeys begin with a first step.
The guidance, strategy, and plan verbiage must, as you point out, result in legislation to be effective.
The President sets the policies. His staff, working with Congress, get the policy enacted in law.
There are the jobs for the laid off bureaucrats time the did some real work like production thinning. LMAO
Change from pushing a pen to pushing a MS660 can’t see it though they are to wimpy
“One of his tasks will be to enable shorter timeframes for evaluating logging plans for their impact on endangered species.”
If the people doing the review of the plans really understood forestry- it would take maybe an hour to do the review, IMHO. 🙂
Allowing for coffee breaks, 70 minutes.
/h
“They first addressed what the White House calls “the threat to national security from imports of timber and lumber.””
Not sure how they conclude it’s a national security issue- but it is obviously a big economic issue.
The current administration, and I concur, view economic issues as threats to national security.
“The order also returns to the wisdom of indigenous communities, who managed American forests with fire for millennia.”
This indigenous story of “managing forests” is overblown. They weren’t managing the forest- they just knew the fire would would increase their chance of a successful hunt. More like, managing the land to get more food- not the same thing as “managing the forest”.
Some of that is true, but they also did thin the forests but gathering firewood and some reports indicate they did controlled burns. Since some people back then grew crops, no doubt some of the burns were to clear land for farming.
It is never a simple, singular answer.
Around here- the story is they’d girdle the big trees to kill them then let them die and eventually fall over but meanwhile they’d grow crops. After burning a section of forest, new growth of trees and other vegetation would spring up- attracting deer.
I have seen similar, yes.
The early colonists in New England did the same until they finally cleared the land. And if that wasn’t enough work- they dug up rocks and built stone walls. No wonder they were a tough breed.
How exactly did stone age people do a controlled burn?
The “North Carolina’s Dogwood Alliance” is a nasty entity. They are against all logging everywhere. One of their colleagues is William Moomaw, a retired professor at Tuffs. He’s a physical chemist, whatever that is. He’s dreamed up Proforestation- the theory that not cutting trees will be a major way to save the planet. I’ve argued and debated with him- as he’s right here in Wokeachusetts. A few decades ago he was a reviewer of some sort with the IPCC. Yet, he really understands little about the climate and zero about forestry. The Alliance published a full analysis of Proforestation years ago and I deconstructed it. When I did that- I sent it to Moomaw asking for his opinion. Of course he didn’t bother.
Maybe it is time to repost it here?
When I post pro forestry stuff it usually includes pro woody biomass for power- then I get slammed- but I’ll look for it. Actually, I may have done a video on it too- then took it down. If I can find it, I’ll put it back on YouTube.
Physical chemists are generally well-educated, and in demand in a number of industries. I can’t see that pChem adds much to discussions of forest management, but then again good ideas come from many places. Unfortunately the academic end has its shared of crackpots and ideologues.
Joseph, I viewed your videos of Massachsetts forestry and found them to be educational. You should try to turn your analysis of Proforestation into an essay for WUWT. I bet it would be a good read.
“The Department of the Interior’s record included offering 763 board feet of timber for sale, addressing non-native and invasive species across over a million acres….”
763 board feet? That would be in one medium size pine. 🙂
There must be a typo in there.
Probably meant 763 million board feet. Sounds like a lot but it’s not really. The last timber sale I did was just over a million feet- and I’m just a one man show. I picked every tree and marked it and tallied it. That’s the part of forestry work I liked the most- walking all day picking trees for cutting. I’d have to consider what will the forest look like after it’s cut? How will it develop? What will be the long term economics of those trees? When you first do this- it seems like just too much to think about- but after you get used to it- you just do it and do it fast.
Cool job. A lot different than rocketry, which is how I earn my keep.
missing millions…
“Opponents scoffed that “they are after timber.””
Yuh, every forestry hater says that and everyone of them live in wood homes with wood furniture and tons of paper products.
Step one. Take away their toilet paper.
Seal the deal.
“And maybe increasing domestic logging will help revive an American industry as old as America itself.”
Forestry is close to dead in New England. Most of the pulp mills up north are gone. The state governments now offer excessive oversight- in theory, to protect environmental values. But the amazing reality of these forests is that they are so resilient- for centuries they were logged with no oversight and they always grew back- the wetlands and rare species are still there.
Wokeachusetts established a committee to recommend “climate smart forestry practices”. The committee consisted of no climate expert and no forestry expert. It came up with truly stupid ideas, like- we should cut much lighter and far less often. That would result in bad silviculture and very bad long term economics. Forestry policies in this state are truly ignorant and always have been during my 50 years as a forester. And I’ve spent all that time fighting them. Several times they tried to destroy me but they always failed. A few times the ACLU in Boston helped and when they did, the state backed down quickly.
Funny how forestry is the original well paying green job.
It’s reasonably well paying if you have a government job or in big industry- not so much if a consultant as I was- especially if doing the work the way it should be done. Example: you see an 18″ diameter red oak of good form. It’s valuable right now. But, if left in the woods another 20 years it may grow several inches- grow into a better grade of lumber too- and be worth 2-3 times as much, to the owner- earning a high rate of return. But, if it was cut now, nobody would complain- the owner wouldn’t know about the loss of future value growth because nobody would tell him- the state people overseeing the cut don’t care as long as you don’t damage wetlands and rare species. It’s a moral dilemma. Do it wrong and make money and nobody will realize it shouldn’t have been cut. Do it right- leave the tree, and lose the income. I always gave thought to the karma, so I’d leave a tree like that unless I knew the owner was desperate for the money. Few were. Most were fairly wealth from NYC or southern CT who owned 2nd homes with nice woodlots in western MA. So, my income was rather low most of my career and now my social security is low too. But, I have earned lots of good karma! 🙂
The previous wood policy reminds me of the previous oil policy. Cut back on domestic oil production any buy from Venezuela, Russia and Iran.
The irony is that these same “environmentalists” have promoted policies that lead to chopping down trees in North Carolina to produce wood pellets to be shipped to the UK and burned in “green” electricity plants.
I recall…. “But, but, the Spotted Owls.”
It’s about time sanity is restored.
Rebuilding America’s timber industry is vital to the environment and economy. With technological advances in timbering and lumber cutting we could become a net lumber exporter, and our ability to utilize far more of what in past was waste from timbering/lumber cutting is a boon few people realize.
Wont help with burning of towns, wont help with slow moving animals and insects
“wont help with slow moving animals and insects”
I guess you’re in trouble, then.
You do realize that “wont” and “won’t” are different words. Oh, my fault. You’re just not that bright.
It would be nice if the government let adjacent private property owners ( to federal lands of all kinds) do some sort of mitigation work next to their properties, say within 500 ft or so of the common property lines – removing deadwood etc to make their own property more fire safe. I think you would have a lot of private property owners doing work on their dime, just to increase their own fire security… and I say all of this as a land owner which shared a boundary with federal land. Hope someone in Washington is reading this & thinking about it
“They also maintained public access roads…”
Oregon, uphill from Roseberg in the 1990’s. A logging road leading into the hills. A sign at the bottom, a number. That was the CB channel that the logging trucks were using. Quite a bit of the ‘road’ was single lane, with wider spots for turnouts. Key the mike, “Ford pickup with a trailer, at the bottom, headed up.” And wait for any reply. Maybe, “Ford pickup, I’m on the side, come ahead.” Even at the end of the season when trucks were bringing cattle down from summer grazing, “Come ahead, we’ll wait.” We found the professional drivers there to be very courteous.
We need the lumber, it’s there, go get it.