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The surprising truth about logging

The reality behind Trump’s push to log more public forests is weirdly complicated.

The value of forest ecosystems is hard to overstate. Blanketing roughly a third of the US, they supply clean water and air, absorb planet-warming carbon dioxide, and provide homes for imperiled wildlife and a tranquil place for Americans to hunt and fish.

It’s for this reason that environmental advocates widely opposed a plan announced by the Trump administration last spring. In an early March executive action, he ordered his administration to ramp up logging in our public forests, including those managed by the US Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management. Failing to “fully exploit” forests for timber, Trump said, weakens our economic security, degrades fish and wildlife habitat, and sets the stage for wildfire disasters.

A month later, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins, who also oversees the US Forest Service (USFS), declared an unexpected emergency across more than half of the agency’s forests, citing the risk of wildfire, disease, and other threats. The emergency declaration allows USFS to log those lands with far fewer restrictions.

These moves drew unsurprising reactions from environmental groups.

“The Trump administration is brazenly sacrificing our forests and the species that depend on them,” Robert Dewey, former VP of government relations at Defenders of Wildlife, a nonprofit conservation group, said last spring after the Trump announcement. “There is no legitimate reason or emergency to justify rubberstamping logging projects.”

Defenders of Wildlife and other organizations called the emergency declaration a gift to the timber industry.

It is indeed hard to see a good intention for our nation’s forests through Trump’s track record. At face value, his administration’s logging push seems like multiple environmental disasters waiting to happen.

Yet there are two important points these concerns tend to overlook, starting out with this: Logging isn’t always the environmental boogeyman it’s made out to be.

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Logging is often less harmful than you think

Logging is one of those things that seems universally and irrefutably awful for the environment. It brings to mind nightmarish images of giant machinery flattening pristine forests filled with helpless critters, à la movies like FernGully and Avatar. And in some parts of the world — and historically in the US — those images are not far off the mark.

But the reality today is more complicated.

The first thing to know is that many of our public forests are already not in a truly “natural” state. Decades of misguided fire suppression and a period of widespread logging in the wake of World War II produced forests today that are dense with trees of similar age, which makes them prone to intense wildfires and attacks from pests.

While it may sound counterintuitive, selective logging or thinning — i.e., removing some but not all of the trees —........

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