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San Francisco Chronicle
18-05-2025
- Politics
- San Francisco Chronicle
Trump wants to let chain saws loose in California national forests. Here's how it could go
The Trump administration is calling in the chain saws at scores of national forests, including the 18 in California, hoping to ramp up timber production in places that millions of Americans visit each year. But the effort will only get so far. Despite fears of vicious clear-cutting, forestry experts say too many things are working against today's timber trade to expect a vast expansion of logging, especially in California, whether it's the forests around Lake Tahoe, near Yosemite or at Big Sur. For starters, the industry has lost capacity to process wood. There are also issues with the trees, which have been degraded by wildfires and drought or set aside for protection. Additionally, recent federal staffing cuts are likely to hobble the Forest Service's ability to prepare logging contracts. 'Operationally, they're not going to get much done,' said Bill Stewart, emeritus forestry specialist at UC Berkeley. The inability to significantly increase timber operations, while sparing trees, comes with downsides. Foremost may be a failure to reduce wildfire risk. Targeted tree removal, though often controversial, is sometimes used as a tactic to make wildlands less combustible by thinning overgrown vegetation. With so much of the West burning in recent years, the need to safeguard forests and nearby communities is indisputable. California has seen nine of its 10 biggest blazes in the past decade. Just months ago, parts of Los Angeles were obliterated by flames. The Trump administration cites fire danger as one of the reasons for wanting more trees cut, alongside wanting to 'fully exploit' public lands for wood supplies and revive the domestic timber industry. 'Increasing logging, in and of itself, is not a terrible threat,' said John Buckley, executive director of the Central Sierra Environmental Resource Center, a nonprofit that advocates for healthy mountain landscapes. 'If it is consistently (done) in a fashion that keeps environmental protection measures, it may result in a more fire-resistant forest.' The president's push for logging comes alongside a handful of other major initiatives intended to harden forests to fire, each of which may involve removing trees. They include the bipartisan Fix our Forests Act and Save our Sequoias Act, both being taken up by Congress. In addition, Gov. Gavin Newsom is directing expedited fire-prevention work, including tree removal, on state and private lands. Many environmental groups remain wary of these efforts. Despite headwinds facing the timber industry, the groups say profit-driven logging companies will find ways to use the policies to cut down high-value trees that have little to do with fire danger. Even a small amount of logging, they say, can sometimes cause great damage to forests and ecosystems. A steady decline. Then, an executive order President Donald Trump's executive order to boost logging was issued March 1 and has since crystalized into a U.S. Forest Service directive to increase timber production by 25% over five years. Plans for how and where the additional logging will occur are yet to be drafted. Forest Service officials, though, confirmed that all of California's national forests will play a role in meeting the target. The agency manages about 20 million acres in California, from the Cleveland National Forest near Mexico to the Klamath National Forest along the Oregon border. The federal lands, which are obliged to serve several purposes, including recreation, wilderness and commercial activity, constitute more than half of the state's forests. 'Active management has long been at the core of Forest Service efforts to address the many challenges faced by the people and communities we serve,' agency officials said in an emailed response to the Chronicle about the proposed increase in timber production. While logging is a staple in national forests, the practice has subsided considerably in recent decades. Nationwide, timber sales on agency lands averaged about 3 billion board feet annually over the past few years compared to almost four times that amount in the logging heydays of the 1970s and '80s, federal data show. The drop in sales has come with a decline in infrastructure. In California, there are about 30 medium-to-large sawmills today, down from more than 100 last century. Most of the existing mills have been retooled to process smaller trees. Scott Stephens, a professor of fire ecology and forestry at UC Berkeley's Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, said the industry simply doesn't have the capacity to quickly rebound. He said a few mills in California's far north may be able to increase output but that does little good for the rest of the state. 'They've actually tried putting (logs) on train cars and shipping them to Northern California or all the way up to Oregon, and it turned out to be fiscally implausible,' he said. Biomass plants, which turn wood into energy and have been lauded as an alternative way to bring trees to market, are yet to prove viable on a large scale. Even if the timber industry was able to process more trees, logging companies wouldn't necessarily source the additional wood from national forests. The industry has increasingly shifted to private lands for supplies, with federal lands now accounting for less than 10% of the wood produced in California, compared to more than 40% in the 1980s. Among the reasons that federal lands have fallen out of favor are that many high-value trees have burned or been marred by insects and disease, or they remain off-limits to loggers or are too hard to get to. The smaller, more accessible trees aren't worth the cost of cutting. Some forests, including the Los Padres National Forest, which is home to Big Sur, and the Angeles National Forest in Southern California haven't seen significant interest from logging companies in decades. The challenge of turning things around on federal lands would likely be complicated by staff reductions at the Forest Service. The Trump administration, as part of a broad effort to streamline government, has enacted layoffs, early retirements and forced leaves. The number of employees lost at the 35,000-person Forest Service is unclear, with union officials initially estimating that 10% of the workforce was cut though some workers have since been reinstated and others have accepted buyouts. Even before the new administration, the agency was short staffed. More reductions are expected. While logging in national forests is generally done by private companies, federal employees select the sites, bid out the projects, manage the permitting and keep tabs on the work — all responsibilities that would be slowed with fewer scientists and forestry technicians. Already, staff cuts are prompting forest managers to plan for fewer recreation services. The largest logging company in California, Sierra Pacific Industries, declined an interview with the Chronicle to discuss the prospects for timber production under the new administration. George Gentry, the senior vice president of the trade group California Forestry Association, acknowledged that the industry faces challenges but said he welcomes the overtures at both the federal and state levels to support logging and forest restoration. What exactly this will mean for timber production, he said, depends on how the policies play out. A war on red tape Last month, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins set the stage for expedited approvals of logging projects by declaring an emergency across 113 million acres of national forests, citing wildfires, disease and insect infestation. The designated area represents 59% of the agency's total lands. Forest Service officials have since detailed how new timber proposals on emergency lands will be advanced through scaled-back environmental reviews, public input and expert consultation, when legally possible. While it's unclear whether the streamlined approval process will spur more logging, the Trump administration isn't alone in deeming red tape an obstacle to forestry work. Political leaders on both sides of the aisle, wanting to do more to address the wildfire crisis, are pushing to fast-track approvals of tree projects. Both the Fix our Forests Act, with bipartisan authorship that includes Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Calif., and the Save our Sequoias Act, similarly sponsored by Democrats and Republicans, call for comprehensive forest management strategies on federal lands. In doing so, they codify rollbacks of project reviews under the National Environmental Policy Act and Endangered Species Act for a range of activities. These include creating fuel breaks, proactively burning flammable vegetation and cutting down trees. (The Trump administration's agenda is focused almost solely on cutting down trees.) Newsom in March issued an emergency proclamation that supports a similar multifaceted approach to confronting wildfires on state-governed lands. Issued on the same day as Trump's executive order on timber production, the directive suspends provisions of the California Environmental Quality Act and Coastal Act to accelerate forestry projects. A raft of environmental groups, which includes the Sierra Club and Center for Biological Diversity, is concerned not only about the ecological harm that can come with efforts to sidestep regulation but that much of the intended forestry work, particularly removing trees, won't temper wildfire danger. It's a subject of increasing debate among scientists. 'Logging is not going to curb fires, not in the era of climate change,' said Chad Hanson, research ecologist and director of the John Muir Project. 'It tends to make them burn faster and hotter and toward towns.' Studies have shown that active timber sites can readily carry flames, as they did during the massive 2021 Dixie Fire. In many logged areas, the larger, fire-resistant trees have been removed while the smaller trees that replace them are more susceptible to burning. Also, tree removal can leave forests hotter and windier and hence more prone to an extreme fire, especially as the planet warms. At the same time, studies have shown that many forests are dangerously overgrown, largely due to decades of putting out wildfires that would have otherwise cleared vegetation, and that selective logging would reduce the threat. 'Excess timber will come out of the forest in only two ways: Either we will carry it out, or nature will burn it out,' said Rep. Tom McClintock, R-El Dorado Hills, who represents parts of the Sierra Nevada and is a co-sponsor of both the Fix our Forests Act and Save our Sequoias Act. The congressman supports Trump's order for more logging. Stephens, who researches wildfire prevention methods at UC Berkeley, said logging can be good or bad for a forest, depending on how it's done. 'The untreated forest is vulnerable to calamity. If you go in there and just focus on restoration and trying to reduce surface fuels, you can make it better,' he said. 'But if you go in there and say we need to cut this many board feet, you miss' the point. While opposition to logging is inevitable, some environmental groups have warmed to the idea as part of a holistic approach to improving forest conditions and lessening fire risk. The National Audubon Society, Environmental Defense Fund and Save the Redwoods League are among those that are supportive of an all-of-the-above strategy. Each is backing at least one of the forestry bills in Congress. The directives issued by the Trump administration, however, have not found favor with the environmental community. Many groups see the president's interest in wildfire safety as simply a pretext to do more commercial logging. Stephens said he's not 'alarmed' by the push for logging, underscoring the logistical constraints facing the timber industry. He's happy to see any fire-mitigation strategies get off the ground at this point, after years with little progress improving forest health and more wildfires. 'Look at what we've endured,' he said. 'The costs are so high. The restoration of our forests is paramount. I just don't know what else to say. We need to address the condition of our forest.'
The Hill
11-04-2025
- Politics
- The Hill
US West senators introduce bipartisan wildfire mitigation bill, despite environmentalist opposition
A bipartisan cohort of U.S. West senators on Friday introduced legislation aimed at managing forests and mitigating fires, despite ongoing opposition from many environmental groups. The Fix our Forests Act, a companion bill to House legislation with the same name, seeks to bolster wildfire resilience by improving forest administration, supporting fire-safe communities and streamlining approvals for projects that defend residents and ecosystems from devastating blazes, according to its authors. The bill — introduced by Sens. John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.), John Curtis (R-Utah), Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) and Tim Sheehy (R-Mont.) — resulted from months of negotiations to reach a bipartisan consensus on these strategies and on collaborative efforts among federal agencies, states, tribes and other stakeholders. 'We need to act NOW with the speed required to mitigate wildfires and make our homes and businesses more resilient to these disasters, and to put in place protections for our communities and the environment,' Hickenlooper said in a statement. Echoing these sentiments, Curtis warned that the America West is 'on the front lines of a growing wildfire crisis,' while noting the months of 'bipartisan cooperation and consensus-building' that took place among himself and his colleagues. 'The longer we wait, the more acres will burn, and more families will be impacted,' the Utah Republican added. The legislation would involve establishing new programs to reduce wildfire risks across high-priority 'firesides,' while expanding tools for fresh health projects — such as faster access to certain hazardous fuels treatments, the senators explained. Also key to the bill would be the creation of a single interagency program to help residents build and retrofit using fire-resistant tactics within the wild land-urban interface. The senators also emphasized a need to expand research and demonstration initiatives, streamline federal response and enable watershed protection and restoration projects to include adjacent non-federal lands. The Fix Our Forests Act has earned the support of several conservation groups, including the Environmental Defense Fund, The Nature Conservancy and the Alliance for Wildfire Resilience. Also on board with the bill are Colorado Gov. Jared Polis (D), California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) and Utah Gov. Spencer Cox (R). Nonetheless, the legislation has also amassed vehement opposition from other key environmental voices — circumstances that were already apparent when the House companion bill, sponsored by Rep. Bruce Westerman (R-Ark.), passed in January. Earthjustice on Friday warned that 'the bill would stifle citizen voices, remove science from land management decisions, and facilitate a large-scale rollback' of longstanding environmental protection policies 'on millions of areas of federal land.' 'This bill instead would codify the Trump administration's attacks on our national forests and open the door for the timber industry to recklessly log our forests under the guise of forest management,' Blaine Miller-McFeeley, Earthjustice senior legislative representative, said in a statement. An analysis from Earthjustice argued that the bill would open swaths of federal land to logging without requiring scientific review or community input, and thereby raise the risk of wildfires. The group also flagged that the legislation removes Endangered Species Act consultation mandates and restricts the rights of citizens to judicial review. Environment America, meanwhile, has maintained that the Fix our Forests Act proposes exempting a range of 'vegetation management activities,' such as logging, from environmental review. A press statement from the organization noted that more than 85 environmental groups oppose the bill for similar such reasons. But Environmental Defense Fund's executive director, Amanda Leland, argued that 'with the right funding, this bipartisan proposal will help,' as many Americans fight 'a very real and growing threat to their homes.' Padilla, who co-chairs the bipartisan Senate Wildfire Caucus, advocated for 'durable solutions to confront the growing impacts of the wildfire crisis.' The bill, he contended, constitutes 'a strong, bipartisan step forward, not just in reducing wildfire risk in and around our national forests, but in protecting urban areas and our efforts to reduce climate emissions.'
