The Trump administration is opening up almost 113 million acres of land to logging. That’s nearly 60% of our nation’s forests, and they’re mostly in our region.
On a map of the land now open to logging, a sea of blue dots covers western Wyoming, northern Idaho and central Colorado.
In those places, the U.S. Forest Service has been charged with streamlining permitting and bypassing environmental analyses to increase timber production by 25%.
One of the goals is to increase domestic timber production, according to a memo from U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins.
“The United States has an abundance of timber resources that are more than adequate to meet our domestic timber production needs,” Rollins wrote, “but heavy-handed federal policies have prevented full utilization of these resources and made us reliant on foreign producers.”
Rollins also said the strategy will reduce wildfire risk, but groups such as The Wilderness Society — a conservation-focused nonprofit — see it instead as a giveaway of land to private industry that stifles public participation.
“Don’t be fooled: the Trump administration and its allies in Congress aren’t trying to solve the wildfire crisis or protect communities threatened by it,” Josh Hicks, conservation campaigns director for The Wilderness Society, said in a press release. “Instead, they are aiming to deepen the pockets of private industry to log across our shared, public forests, while sidestepping public review.”
But Ben Wudtke, executive director of the Intermountain Forest Association, said the move won’t have as much of an impact on forests. His organization represents timber product companies in Wyoming, Colorado and South Dakota.
“This is not a plan to log our national forest into oblivion,” Wudtke said.
Instead, he said it’s a plan that could help timber companies that are struggling to get by.
States such as Wyoming and Colorado don’t produce much high-value timber, but Wudtke said the directive could still help the economy — while cutting down trees to protect communities from fire.
“Mitigating wildfire hazards and boosting domestic timber production are hand in hand,” he argued. ”The timber production comes from doing the work on the landscape.”
But critics say amid federal cuts, there may not be enough Forest Service employees to carry out that fire mitigation work.
The Forest Service is now working on its plan of how exactly it will increase timber volume by 25%.
This story was produced by the Mountain West News Bureau, a collaboration between Wyoming Public Media, Nevada Public Radio (KNPR) in Las Vegas, Boise State Public Radio in Idaho, KUNR in Nevada, KUNC in Colorado and KANW in New Mexico, with support from affiliate stations across the region. Funding for the Mountain West News Bureau is provided in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
