Here’s All The Forests Trump Plans To Cut Down

Emergency order opens up 59 percent of American forests to logging. But how much will we actually lose?

“We’re facing a national forest emergency," stated U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins last week, announcing her order to expedite timber permitting across 112 million acres of national forest. “We have an abundance of timber at high risk of wildfires in our National Forests.” So the plan, of course, is to skip the process that enables logging projects to reduce wildfire risk, and just proceed willy nilly.

The map up top was produced by USDA to accompany Rollins’ order. Here’s a link to the original version if you’d like to see it in the highest resolution possible. Green areas are forest boundaries, blue stuff is the 112 million acres that will now be made available to logging, without the usual permitting process.

Taking an initial look at that map, it’s easy to come to the conclusion that what Rollins is doing is essentially opening up every national forest with trees to logging, pretty much in the entirety, including areas that are currently off-limits to such practice.

And that’s true, partially. The map includes, for instance, the Hyalite Porcupine Buffalo Horn Wilderness Study Area here in southwest Montana. You can’t log Wilderness Study Areas. But(!) Montana Senator Steve Daines has been working to revoke the state’s million-or-so acres of WSAs since 2012. Maybe Rollins is banking on him achieving that during Trump’s second term.

Logging, as with other forms of industrial extraction on public lands, can’t simply occur just because people hellbent on destroying this country want it to. As I explained about drilling in ANWR, large capital investments take time to plan, and require conducive business environments that offer the stability necessary to see through multi-year if not multi-decade periods of development before they generate returns. And if the current administration is achieving anything, it’s whatever the opposite of certainty is when it comes to regulations, the economy, and the arbitrary persecution of anything ranging from minorities to private corporations.

The basic financial formula for extraction is achieved by subtracting the cost of getting goods to market from the price at which those goods can be sold. But both sides of that equation are currently in flux, on both the macro and micro economic levels.

Trump’s moronic, AI-generated, on-again, off-again trade war isn’t going to help there. Lumber used in America is a mix of stuff that’s both cut here, and imported. A significant portion of lumber cut in America is exported, where it’s often turned into shitty furniture that is sold back to American consumers. Tariffs and threats are going to destabilize that market. And the impact of that moronic trade war on interest rates, the value of the dollar, and unemployment will also negatively impact the housing market, causing further disruptions to timber demand.

“Housing construction and sales have an explicit effect on many wood products markets, as reflected by overall declines in levels of production and consumption across most wood product categories over the 2021-2022 period,” explains a white paper on the subject, produced by USDA's Forest Products Laboratory last year.

The more chaos Trump causes, the less impact his deregulatory policies will have on our public lands. Root for war with Canada if you care about the environment.

But the unpredictable ecosystem for logging and other extraction operations doesn’t stop there. All these activities require passable roads through which logs can be brought out of the forest, then shipped. Planning which acres to harvest necessitates a sure supply of viable timber in specific log feet by species, in a certain condition, with the ability to access that.

Rollins acknowledges this, setting aside $50 million for road construction and bridge upgrades as part of her plan to expand the harvest of timber products during Trump’s term.

Let’s run some quick math. There’s a lot of variables like side slope angle, drainage, and soil types, but a good estimate for the cost of road construction in a national forest out west was about $16,296/1.5 miles in 2011 dollars. Here in America’s “golden age,” that’s $23,611 (as of February, the CPI calculator has not been updated for trade war conditions). $50 million divided by $23,611 equals 2,117 1.5 miles units, or 1,411 miles of new roads. Given that temporary bridges alone can eat up a further $400,000 a piece, even over small creeks, that’s just not that much new road construction.

Trump’s focus on cutting budgets in order to give billionaires that $5 trillion tax break just isn’t going to create the infrastructure necessary to support much extraction. Shifting these costs to private industry will only serve to drive the cost of lumber harvested in America higher, and contribute to pressure for producers to look to other, cheaper and more stable markets. Siberia is pretty nice this time of year, if you don’t mind all the bugs.

Given that adverse outlook, how much additional timber production is Rollins targeting?

“I am directing all Regional Foresters to develop 5-year strategies, tiered to the national strategy, to increase their timber volume offered, leading to an agencywide increase of 25% over the next 4-5 years,” she writes, in a memo to staff.

With under three billion board feet currently being produced annually in national forests, we’re at about a quarter of the production achieved by national forests as recently as 1988. Increasing that by 25 percent, four to five years from now, isn’t going to mean much. Way to be evil guys, even cartoon super villains would be embarrassed by this stuff.

But, much harm can still be achieved here, even if we’re talking about very modest additions to total timber harvest. I’m again going to reference that article I wrote about ANWR and regulatory certainty. One of the features of the National Environmental Policy Act is a permitting process that enlists input from multiple stake holders.

Rollins is, of course, ordering USFS employees to skip the NEPA process. Her order directs “field leadership to increase timber outputs, simplify permitting, remove National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) processes, reduce implementation and contracting burdens, and to work directly with states, local government, and forest product producers to ensure that the Forest Service delivers a reliable and consistent supply of timber.”

When it comes to logging, those stakeholders consulted during NEPA processes have historically included groups like local communities, and environmental non-profits. When done right, logging can be used to improve forest health, improve wildfire resilience, and reduce risk to homes and businesses, all while creating a renewable resource all of us use. NEPA has helped combine all those goals, while increasing logging profits. When done stupidly, logging exacerbates fire risk and harms the larger environment, often with limited (if any) financial upsides for producers. Rollins is, of course, choosing the latter by trying to avoid NEPA.

And when it comes to exacerbating wildfire risk, Rollins is doubling down. Not only were 700 “red card” holders (staff trained to aid in firefighting efforts) fired by the USDA in February, but upcoming agency wide reductions in force are expected to include the staff that model fire risk, and research forest health.

The result of all this is an allegory for the what’s going on across the rest of the administration. There’s a whole lot of really scary rhetoric, but ultimately the competence and investment to achieve what they say they’re going to do is simply not present. So while there won’t be much in the way of extra timber production, the extra activity that is permitted will be conducted in the dumbest ways possible, ensuring that the only outcome here is the opposite of everything they say they’re trying to do.

We are facing a wildfire emergency in this country. But all Brooke Rollins is going to do is make that worse, without even earning the economy any more money in the process. Good job everyone.

Wes Siler is your guide to leading a more exciting life outdoors. Upgrading to a paid subscription supports independent journalism and gives you personal access to his expertise and network, which he’ll use to help you plan trips, purchase gear, and solve problems. You can read more about what he’s doing on Substack through this link.