The president wants to bypass environmental rules to increase domestic timber production. Here’s what that means for America’s public lands. It’s a viral Instagram post that makes a startling claim. President “Trump has ordered over 100 million hectares of forest” — the equivalent of 280 million acres — “to be chopped down,” reads the text superimposed over a photo of towering redwoods. “That’s nearly three times the size of California.” As of Friday afternoon, this particular post has been shared more than 100,000 times. Similar posts claiming that Trump has ordered logging companies to “cut 280 million acres of trees in National Forests and protected public lands” have surfaced on other social media sites as well. But are they accurate? Here’s everything you need to know. Where is this coming from? On March 1, Trump quietly signed an executive order called “Immediate Expansion of American Timber Production.” In it, the president bemoaned “heavy-handed Federal policies” that have “forced our Nation to rely upon imported lumber, thus exporting jobs and prosperity and compromising our self-reliance.” He also claimed such policies have “contributed to wildfire disasters.” “The United States has an abundance of timber resources that are more than adequate to meet our domestic timber production needs,” he continued. “It is vital that we reverse these policies and increase domestic timber production to protect our national and economic security.” The rest of the order laid out Trump’s plan to accomplish that. So what is Trump’s plan?
Trump directed the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to come up with ways to “facilitate increased timber production” and “improve the speed of approving forestry projects.” He instructed the departments of agriculture and the interior to exempt “timber thinning” and “timber salvage” from the National Environmental Policy Act — meaning the government would no longer require environmental assessments or environmental impact statements before approving those activities. And perhaps most important, Trump told the same agencies to use the emergency regulations of the Endangered Species Act (ESA) to “the maximum extent permissible” under existing law. On the same day Trump issued his “American timber production” order, he also put out another order launching an investigation into whether “imports of these products threaten to impair national security.” Usually, the ESA shields about 400 species that live in America’s national forests — grizzly bears, spotted owls, wild salmon — from actions that would destroy their habitats. But the government can bypass those protections in certain situations, such as “acts of God, disasters, casualties, national defense or security emergencies.” In theory, Trump could declare a national security emergency over, say, imported Canadian lumber once his investigation concludes — and then use emergency ESA exemptions to help the logging industry cut down more trees on public land. Roughly a quarter of the lumber used in the U.S. comes from Canada. How many acres are at risk? In Trump’s executive order, he targeted timber “from Federal lands managed by the BLM and the USFS.” The USFS manages 193 million acres of forest and woodlands, according to its website The BLM manages 58 million acres, according to its website. That’s 251 million acres in total — not quite the 280 million figure that’s been circulating on social media (and in some news reports), but still a lot.
Whether all 251 million acres are actually in danger of being “chopped down” or “clear cut,” however, is a different question. Even in the most extreme scenario, the U.S. logging industry wouldn’t have the sawmills or workers required to ramp up and raze forests “nearly three times the size of California” within the next four years. The bottom line Trump’s recent moves make it clear that he wants to reduce, streamline or circumvent environmental regulations in order to increase domestic timber production and reduce imported timber from places like Canada. Even Trump’s new Forest Service chief is a former timber industry lobbyist. That signals more trees will be cut down. How many more remains to be seen. Ultimately, Trump is unlikely to flatten hundreds of millions of acres during his second term. But whatever the scale, environmentalists warn that expanding logging while reducing oversight will damage fragile ecosystems, threaten old-growth forests, increase pollution and even worsen wildfires. “This Trump executive order is the most blatant attempt in American history by a president to hand over federal public lands to the logging industry,” Chad Hanson, a wildfire scientist at the John Muir Project, told the Guardian. “Trump’s exact approach — logging in remote forests and telling communities that it will stop fires — is responsible for numerous towns being destroyed by fires in recent years, and hundreds of lives lost.”
