Environmental groups are sounding the alarm after the U.S. Department of Agriculture declared more than 100 million acres of national forest land “an emergency situation” that can only be helped with chain saws, wood chippers and the bigger, more destructive tools of industrial logging.
But an attorney specializing in environmental litigation and a longtime forester and policy analyst both say contrary to how bad the memo from USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins may sound, its contents could be a shot in the arm the U.S. needs to ramp up its response to the growing wildfire crisis and continue much-needed work on forest health and restoration where mill infrastructure exists.
The memo Rollins sent Friday follows an executive order President Donald Trump made in March directing federal agencies to explore ways to ramp up timber production, expedite delivery and “decrease timber supply uncertainty” across 280 million acres of national forests and other public lands by bypassing the Endangered Species Act and other environmental regulations.
The order gained significance Monday following reports that the U.S. was preparing to increase tariffs on Canadian lumber, independent of Trump’s new “reciprocal” tariffs. But the commodity was spared when Trump Wednesday authorized a 90-day pause on his reciprocal tariff plans for all countries except China, leaving Mexico and Canada with a baseline 10% global tariff.
Trump’s executive order says the U.S.’ inability to “fully exploit” its timber supply has, among other things, contributed to wildfire disasters.
So Rollins is directing USDA, under which the Forest Service and Natural Resources Conservation District fall, to open logging on 67 million acres of national forest land rated as “very high or high” wildfire risk, 78 million acres characterized as declining from insect and disease infestation and 34 million acres covered in both to reduce hazardous fuels on the forest floor, reduce the density of fire-dependent forests and increase forest health.
Within hours of the announcement, The Wilderness Society issued a statement calling Rollins’ memo “part of a multipronged attack to massively reduce capacity at the Forest Service to fight the wildfire crisis and properly manage the national forests.” It will also deepen the pockets of private industry to log across public forests and sidestep public review, the statement said.
But Jonathan Wood, vice president of law and policy at the Property and Environment Research Center, and Sharon Friedman, founder and managing editor of The Smokey Wire, a community sourced news site for forest and federal lands issues, have a different take on the situation.
PERC, which advocates what it calls “free-market environmentalism,” uses incentives and market-based solutions to solve environmental problems and has been working on modern wildfire issues since launching its Fix America’s Forests initiative in 2020. In February it released a map identifying the most opportune places to restore Western forests. And it advocates for private-public partnerships to do strategic thinning and prescribed burning projects.
Wood said Rollins’ order basically builds on a previous order USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack issued to declare an emergency situation on around 50 million acres of forest lands “in order to streamline processes for wildfire risk reduction work that could be done on the national forest.”
That’s important because according to the Forest Service’s Confronting the Wildfire Crisis report, the agency is catastrophically far behind in this work. In 2024, it had treated just 1.8 million acres across 21 fire prone landscapes on around 80 million acres in need of wildfire mitigation treatments.
But Friedman said ramping up wildfire mitigation through timber production, at least in Colorado, will be challenging because mills are too few or far between areas suitable for logging “to make economic sense for hauling logs,” they have limited capacity or they don’t exist. “Colorado is not the home of a large timber industry, right?” she added. “So it seems reasonable that what the regions are probably going to do is focus on the areas where there already is one.”
Even so, environmentalists say the orders by Trump and Rollins will empower Congress’ Fix Our Forests Act, which passed with bipartisan support in the House on Jan. 23 and is awaiting action in the Senate. It expedites the review of certain forest management projects under the National Environmental Policy Act and expands the acreage available for mitigation without a full environmental review to 10,000 acres from 3,000. Though the legislature in Congress has a similar name, it is not related to PERC’s Fix America’s Forests initiative.
Randi Spivak, public lands policy director for the Center for Biological Diversity, says the Fix Our Forests Act would allow “carte blanche logging” on 10,000 acres, or about 15 square miles of Forest Service land under each review, and that “unleashing the bulldozers and chain saws on these beautiful public lands will result in clear-cuts, polluted streams and extinct species.”
But Friedman said these reviews, called categorical exclusions, can be litigated “as easily as an Environmental Assessment or an environmental-impact statement” yet it takes less time for the Forest Service to do one than an EA or EIS, so litigation, should it come, could happen faster, which could speed up getting vital fire mitigation projects going on a timeline that could actually help solve the problem.
“Timber industry, where it exists, can help remove woody material and reduce fuels, which in many cases is needed prior to prescribed burning or in areas where residents don’t want burning,” she added. “In some places, like Montana, mills are closing, not for lack of supply but because of other factors like cost of housing. For us in the dry West, it's about helping industries that use this material keep smoke and carbon out of the air. For the last 30 or more years, the Forest Service has tried to find other industries to use the material, but so far most of what have been successful are sawmills.”
