Feds move to expand logging in Pacific Northwest

Lily Roby

PORTLAND, Ore. (CN) — Since 1994, the Northwest Forest Plan has protected 24 million acres of Pacific Northwest forests from logging.

That could soon change. With the stated goal of preventing wildfires, the U.S. Forest Service next year could open as many as 2.6 million additional acres to the timber industry. The agency, which manages 17 national forests and other federal lands across the region, says the current plan hasn’t adequately balanced economic interests with habitat restoration for species like the northern spotted owl, which remains endangered.

Across the Northwest, residents and conservation groups alike are wary of the changes. On March 1, President Donald Trump issued an executive order that called for the “immediate expansion of American timber production” on federal lands, reversing longtime environmental policies in the name of economic interests and national security.

The Trump administration says its approach is about “wildfire risk reduction.” Environmental nonprofits like Oregon Wild and WildEarth Guardians, which have trawled through thousands of Forest Service documents, say the changes would instead amount to a timber grab.

“Usually when industry — or, in this case, the Trump administration — does big timber grabs like this, it’s behind the guise of wildfire policy,” Lauren Anderson, the climate forests program manager at Oregon Wild, said at a public meeting in March. “But they’re not trying to hide the ball on this one.”

“They’re saying they just want to log it all and for money,” Anderson continued. “This is going to result in profit-driven decisions and undermine ecological values.”

American public lands contain vast amounts of timber. The logging industry has long hoped to access more of it, according to Forest Service records from the first Trump presidency obtained by the group WildEarth Guardians.

In one internal memo, from June 2017, officials state that by 2020, they hope to increase annual national timber volume by 4 billion board feet.

“Are we doing more [environmental] analysis than is necessary?” one regional official asks in the document. “Can we take more risk in some areas?”

In a May 2018 email, the head of the Pacific Northwest’s Threatened and Endangered Species program expresses concerns raised by an unnamed timber company that “limited operating periods” for logging are “precluding their ability to have a viable timber sale.”

“I am trying to help them find options … but am really at a loss for ideas,” the official writes. “They are very concerned [about] not meeting this year’s timber target.”

Further emails from 2018 also complain about “the LSR stuff” — that is, rules on the Forest Service’s so-called late successional reserves, which mostly contain protected old-growth trees. Such restrictions made it difficult for Washington’s Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest to meet annual timber targets, officials complain.

Yet more documents show that before the Forest Service publicly announced proposed changes to the Northwest Forest Plan in late 2023, agency officials first met with representatives from the timber industry. They encouraged staff to use legal avenues to “expedite [National Environmental Policy Act] decisions and build timber sale shelf stock.”

After meeting with the Associated Oregon Loggers, a trade group, the Forest Service in 2018 declared the current Northwest Forest Plan was “outdated and politically drawn.” Proposed changes call for “improv[ing] the consistency and reliability of timber harvest.”

Ryan Talbott, a conservationist with WildEarth Guardians who helped review the records, said it was troubling “how [Forest Service officials] talk about managing national forests.”

“That’s very problematic for the person that’s in charge of protecting endangered species” to be focused on increasing logging, he said in an interview.

Taken together, watchdogs like WildEarth Guardians say these documents show the Forest Service during the Trump administration prioritized industry over concerns like conservation, endangered-species protection and recreational use.

With Trump now back in office and emboldened, conservationists fear how Republican calls for increased timber production could play out in the Pacific Northwest.

Project 2025 argues that increasing timber sales in public lands “could change the behavior of wildfire because there would be less biomass” — an argument increasingly heard on conservative outlets like Fox News. Brooke Rollins, who oversees the Forest Service as Trump’s secretary for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, likewise wants more logging.

“Secretary Rollins fully supports President Trump’s efforts to increase timber production across national forests nationwide,” a USDA spokesperson said in a statement to Courthouse News. “Providing a sustainable supply of domestic timber has been one of the core missions of the USDA Forest Service since its inception 120 years ago.”

Calls to loosen forest protections have not only come from the Republican Party. The Republican-led Fix Our Forests Act, developed in the aftermath of the 2025 Los Angeles fires with the stated aim of preventing wildfires, mirrors Trump’s executive order on timber production, including by exempting activities like logging from review under the National Environmental Policy Act or NEPA.

The bill would result in changes so drastic that they could be seen from space, Anderson said. And yet the Fix Our Forests Act has garnered bipartisan support and already passed the House, with 64 Democrats voting for it.

Conservationists say policy proposals like the Fix Our Forests Act are based on a lie: It’s just not true that logging plays a major role in preventing fire.

When it comes to reducing wildfires, research clearly shows that “almost all of the benefit comes from prescribed fire, not from logging,” said John Persell, staff attorney for Oregon Wild. “The facts and the science just don’t match what the agency is saying is the rationale behind making these changes.”

In a draft environmental impact statement, released last November, the Forest Service outlined four strategies going forward for managing forests in the Pacific Northwest.

By the time public comment closed on March 17, tens of thousands of people from across the region had submitted comments in opposition. That includes more than 9,000 comments just from Oregon Wild supporters, as well as at least 47,811 more from supporters of other conservation groups.

One proposed action, Action A, is the do-nothing option that would leave the Northwest Forest Plan unchanged.

Of the other three, all emphasize a focus on fire resilience, including allowing more logging to increase economic opportunities for rural communities.

Action B — the proposal for which the Forest Service says there’s the most consensus between the public and agency officials — focuses on active management, increasing timber harvest while retaining old-growth trees.

One particularly controversial proposed change would increase the minimum age at which trees can be logged from 80 to 120 years. That rule change would apply in the Northwest Forest Plan’s so-called late successional reserves (LSRs), which cover nearly 5.9 million acres in the Pacific Northwest. It would open up an additional 824,000 acres of mature forests to logging — an amount of land eight times the size of the Mt. Jefferson Wilderness in central Oregon.

Proponents say the rule would create new habitat within LSRs for species that rely on younger forests. But since LSRs are explicitly designed to protect old growth, critics say the change makes no sense.

“Including a guideline that allows creation of young forests in LSRs eliminates the entire concept of LSRs,” Talbott said. He noted that old-growth trees are typically the most fire resistant and fire resilient.

But even the concept of old-growth trees is on the chopping block. One proposed change would change the technical definition of the term in the Northwest Forest Plan, such that no stands of trees established after 1825 would be considered old growth.

But 1825 is an arbitrary year, Talbott said — and consider for a minute the implications of that rule change. No matter how mighty a tree became, it could never be considered old growth if it became established after 1825. The forests of the Pacific Northwest could theoretically reach a point when they had no old-growth trees, as trees born before 1825 died off or were killed by windstorms and fire. To Talbott, it’s a clear sign the Forest Service wants to prioritize logging over protecting biodiversity and habitat.

According to Anderson, protecting the forests of the Pacific Northwest is about much more than saving ancient trees and endangered species. These forests — particularly their old-growth trees — are some of the biggest carbon stores in the world and therefore a crucial part of the fight against climate change. On the flip side, studies show that logging is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in Oregon, surpassing even transportation.

The Forest Service is expected to release a final draft of its proposed changes in the coming months, but it’ll be 2026 before any final changes are made.

As the public comment period came to a close, the agency held meetings across the region, giving citizens a chance to question Forest Service experts about the changes.

In March, Marina Richie, a conservationist who lives in Bend, Oregon, attended one such meeting in the nearby town of Sisters. Like many here, she was skeptical.

“I’m just very wary of a lot of what I’ve seen,” she said, standing outside of the Sisters-Camp Sherman Fire District Community Hall.

“You see something that sounds pretty good on paper,” Richie added. “Then you go to your favorite forest and see big piles of slosh and logging roads and a lot of trees cut down, so you get a little suspect.” Still, she was glad the public was getting a chance to comment on the changes. She had faith that at least when it came to local Forest Service employees, their hearts were in the right place.