More than 50 per cent of US’s previously protected national forests now open to logging due to Trump’s executive order
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A new executive order from President Trump has threatened the existence of more than half of the country’s national forests – an area larger in size than the entire state of California.
The latest move by Trump has ordered for tree cutting to be expanded across 280 million acres of these forests – along with other public lands – and comes just a month after the President’s executive order to increase American timber production by 25 per cent.
Such measures have been enforced due to what Trump dubs ‘heavy-handed federal policies’, causing the US’s over-reliance on timber imports from other nations.
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According to the president, the US’s avoidance of tapping into its own timber supply has also contributed to wildfire disasters and degraded ecological habitats in the country. Almost one-fifth of the area expanded for tree cutting is deemed as ‘very high’ or ‘high’ wildfire risk by Trump’s Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins.
Such claims have been met with opposition from leading climate experts, including wildfire scientist at the John Muir Project Chad Hanson.
‘This Trump executive order is the most blatant attempt in American history by a president to hand over federal public lands to the logging industry,’ Hanson said.
‘What’s worse, the executive order is built on a lie, as Trump falsely claims that more logging will curb wildfires and protect communities, while the overwhelming weight of evidence shows exactly the opposite.’
The forested areas being targeted by Trump’s new executive order – in the name of tackling wildfires – are not geographically close to the regions hit by some of the country’s most devastating blazes, such as Los Angeles earlier this year or Hawaii back in 2023.
‘Those weren’t forest fires,’ said Anna Medema, who works on forest and public land issues for the Sierra Club. ‘No amount of forest management would have changed those tragedies.’
As well as this, many of the trees being targeted are, in fact, more resilient to wildfires due to thick bark and extensive root systems. If these are felled as planned, younger trees will begin to grow that are more prone to igniting.
The measures set out by Trump directly oppose those enforced by Biden during his presidency, which set out to ban logging projects in areas of national parks with carbon-rich and ecologically important trees.
