On March 1, President Trump issued an executive order entitled “Immediate Expansion of American Timber Production,” to massively accelerate and increase logging on US Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management lands. The USFS and the BLM manage nearly 25 percent of the nation’s forests—about 183 million acres in total, an area larger than Texas. The order will open millions of acres of old-growth and mature forests to clearcutting.
The executive order also severely undermines a key component of the Endangered Species Act (ESA). Under normal circumstances, the ESA requires the USFS and the BLM to engage in formal consultation with the US Fish and Wildlife Service to ensure projects do not jeopardize threatened or endangered species or harm critical habitat. The order, however, invokes the ESA’s emergency provisions to speed up timber sales, even though it identifies no actual emergency. Once these emergency rules are invoked, the USFWS can do nothing more than issue nonbinding recommendations on ways to mitigate harm to species and habitats from agency projects. Formal consultation with the agency on the project’s impact on threatened and endangered species is deferred until the emergency is deemed to be under control—by which time the harm will have already occurred.
Many forest-dependent threatened and endangered species will be placed in peril, including northern and Mexican spotted owls, red-cockaded woodpeckers, Canada lynx, fishers, and several salmon species. Our nation’s forests not only provide habitat for thousands of wildlife species, they also sequester carbon to help mitigate the impacts of climate change, filter drinking water, and provide places for humans to recreate and reconnect with the natural world. The negative consequences of this order, if it is fully implemented, will reverberate for centuries.