Trump's Order to Expand Logging Threatens to Increase Climate-Fueled Wildfires

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https://truthout.org/articles/trumps-order-to-expand-logging-threatens-to-increase-climate-fueled-wildfires/

Trump’s Order to Expand Logging Threatens to Increase Climate-Fueled Wildfires

The president’s push to expand timber and fossil fuel production “is a double whammy on the climate.”

By Curtis Johnson , TRUTHOUT
Published May 17, 2025

On March 1, President Donald Trump signed an executive order titled “Immediate Expansion of American Timber Production.” The order claimed “onerous Federal policies” have hindered domestic timber production and that expanding logging was a matter of protecting “national and economic security.” It ordered the secretary of the Interior and head of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), who oversee the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) respectively, to develop a plan to expand timber targets and streamline permitting “to suspend, revise, or rescind all existing regulations, orders, guidance documents, policies, settlements, consent orders, and other agency actions that impose an undue burden on timber production.”

The responsible departments and agencies were instructed to find categorical exclusions to the National Environmental Policy Act and use “emergency regulations” to circumvent the Endangered Species Act (ESA).

After Trump’s order, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service continued the assault on endangered species by proposing a new rule that would redefine “harm” under the ESA to only include directly killing species, replacing the current definition that includes destruction of a species’ habitat. Habitat destruction is the greatest source of species extinction.

In April, USDA head Brooke Rollins directed the stripping of forest protections on more than half of all national forests and called for expanding timber production by 25 percent to address a “wildfire emergency,” and restore forest “resources.” A report from the Associated Press says the directive “exempts affected forests from an objection process that allows outside groups, tribes and local governments to challenge logging proposals at the administrative level before they are finalized.”

A map of forests Rollins has targeted includes all national forests in Washington State and California, and large sections throughout the west and other parts of the country. It even includes some wilderness areas. These forests contain some of the most cherished old-growth and mature forest ecosystems remaining in the U.S.

… more if you can stand it …

(Brooke. Really. Call your kid Extinct …?)

[2naSalit]

1. And this...

Fix Our Forests Act Doesn’t Fix Forests
George Wuerthner
May 6, 2025

Senators Curtis, Hickenlooper, Padilla, and Sheehy introduced Senate 1462 Fix Our Forests Act (FOFA) legislation. Similar legislation has already passed the House of Representatives.

FOFA is a solution looking for a problem. Unfortunately, our forests do not have problems; even if they did, FOFA would not fix them.

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The idea that logging and prescribed burns can prevent large blazes is analogous to the belief that removing “bad blood” in the Middle Ages could cure illness.

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The most significant factor in large, high-severity blazes is wind. And wind drives embers over, around, and through logged forests and over prescribed burns. I’ve seen multiple places where wind-driven blazes have jumped across places with limited fuel, like 16-lane highways (no fuel) or even the mile-and-a-half-wide Columbia River. The only “fuel break” I’ve ever seen that stopped a wind-driven wildfire is the Pacific Ocean, which halted the westward advance of the Pacific Palisades blaze.

A lot more at link:

https://www.thewildlifenews.com/2025/05/06/fix-our-forests-act-doesnt-fix-forests/