Timber industry and environmental defenders collide with Trump federal logging order

Linna area, Ore. – – The bustle of saw tooth and the smell of chopped pine needles filled the air when Rye Blackburn went up the muddy path placed in the Williamet National Forest, not visible from the forest service below.

He climbed his Timberpro 830C expedor’s cabin and began to pick up the cut trees removed from their branches. The peeling of the sized bark was rained as he lifted the tree after the tree through the air and stacked them at the back of the trailer.

Blackburn has worked in the timber industry for more than 40 years, following the feet of both his father and the older brother.

“There is just no better place to be,” he said.

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Timber once led the economies of countries like Oregon. But forest harvesting since the early 1990s, a stricter environmental rules, variable lumber market and other factors.

President Donald Trump hopes to change this trend of Executive Director Fiat by ordering the US Forest Service to increase logging to federal countries in environmental groups such as Earthjustice calls “cynical attempts to justify destructive registration”.

“This really applies only to the outline of the timber industry’s pockets,” Fox News Digital told Fox News Digital, Earthjustice Senior Legislative Representative Blaine Miller McFeely, a non -profit environmental law group Earthjustice.

Timber fall

The controversial forestry methods, such as transparent, which were popular, as colonists moved to the western flare between the 1970s. Environmental legislation, in particular the designation of the northern spotted owl, which was threatened in 1990, was a crippled blow to register federal land.

According to the government, the amount of timber in the Forest Service land has decreased by almost 80%, reaching a high level in 1987.

It has been severely affected by timber cities.

Tyler Freress, whose grandfather opened the family’s first sawmill in 1922, said federal agencies used to offer 200 million -table foot -wood wood to produce the Oregon Santiam in the Canyon. Now, according to him, it is up to 1 million plank feet a year.

“As a child, I remember the amount of well -being that existed in our country communities,” said Freress. “There were many timber dollars a day and these dollars came directly to our local services.”

At least seven Oregon lumber mills were only closed in 2024, reducing hundreds of jobs, mainly in the country’s fields. It is this month that the Plywood mill in Washington is closed this month across the River Colombia to close 81 jobs.

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“The Federal Government owns most of the Oregon forests. So many of our communities are really dependent on what is happening to the federal countries throughout the state on a social (and) economic point of view,” Fox News Digital told Nick Smith from the American Forest Resources Council, which supports the timber industry.

As the US mill approaches, the country has relied on lumber from other countries, such as Canada, China and Brazil.

“They all use us as a goal for all their wooden products, while reducing the supply of timber has made our raw prices rapidly rising,” said Freress.

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Canadian competitions were about Trump’s mind in March when he signed executive order Immediately expand the production of timber in federal countries.

“We don’t need Canadian lumber,” Trump said. “Our forests are massive, massive forests, we simply are not allowed to use them because of the environmental lantry who stopped us.”

The Executive Order and the following implementation plans divert the forest service to increase the production of timber by 25%in the next four to five years.

A spokesman for the Forest Service said Fox News Digital that the agency is trying to sell the 4 billion board of directors until the 2028. Fiscal year, a number not reached since the early 1990s.

They hope to implement this with a strategy that is severe by streamlining processes and trimming rules, as well as speeding up project approvals. USDA Secretary Brooke Rollin, whose agency oversees the Forest Service, recently announced $ 200 million in contribution to support for this job.

But the plan also forces the Forest Service to speed up environmental reports and “improve compliance”. Miller McFeely hit the Trump’s administration for the implementation of this guideline after the forest service “gutting”. Thousands of employees left the agency in accordance with Trump’s deferred resignation earlier this year.

“Under no circumstances will you be in a wise, reasonable way (25% increase) … Because they don’t have employees to go out and actually perform a specific analysis for the site,” said Miller McFeil.

Rollin told Fox News Digital that previous administrations allowed environmental groups to lead “decision -making in our forests”. This changes under the authority of the Trump Administration.

“A clean and healthy forest is such an important goal,” Rollin said. “This president is not observed for these environmental groups.”

The Forest Service announced that most of the country’s 154 national forests will be affected by order, but varying degrees. The agency does not yet “specific information on how each forest will be affected,” the spokesman wrote in Eto.

This lack of specificity is environmental professionals such as Miller McFelie worried that the loggers “will literally be clearly cut in the back”. He pointed to the plan to include the Alaskan Tonga in the National Forest, a remote moderate rain forest.

“It’s old growth,” he said. Wilds “go for the largest, oldest trees that best protect the communities rather than focus on the small little things that are the most dangerous for the communities”.

But those in the timber industry say that old growth trees, valued by nature lovers are not the main purpose of modern logging.

Oregon infrastructure treatment has changed to focus on smaller, denser trees that grow in larger trees.

“They allow us to make a lot of accurate engineering products,” said Freress. “We are not hunting the biggest trees there.”

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At the place of logging in the Williamet National Forest, Blackburn pointed to clearing.

“If you look directly along the road, you can see a lot of old growth and probably 25 plus percent are dead,” he said. “It just died of natural causes. And what’s a lot of rotting there and has a white spot and it’s not very desirable to any of the wood companies.”

Wild fires, insects and diseases kill many more trees on federal lands than logging, according to forest service reports. This is especially true for old growth trees that have lost nearly 1,400 square miles since 2000 due to the natural causes, according to a government reportCompared to approximately 14 square miles with logging -related losses.

“Our forests die because we are not moving them,” Smith said. “We are in the national fire crisis, which exaggerates millions of acres of national forests.”

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Wild fires that began in the public land in August 2020 in the Santiam Canyon area began on a weekend of weekend, killing five people and burning more than 400,000 acres.

Blackburn lost home fires.

“I was completely burned out,” he said. But he was not surprised to see the canyon burn.

“This will happen. There is nothing in this forest to do with any type of preventive maintenance,” he said. “When a fire starts, which slows it out? It has no fire breaks.”

The timber industry saw the fires as the bitter sweetness “I told you it”.

“Our negligence against these forests has caused something very predictable in the last 30 years,” said Freress. “If we do not control our natural resources, Mother Nature will do it for us, and she will do it very violently.”

Almost five years after the devastating fires in Oregon, the landscape is still scars. Invasive Scottish space paints a mountain slope yellow, flourishing without competition from local shrubs and trees that used to dominate the landscape. The roads are led to burnt hitches and sick tree gray corpses.

The Forest Service planned to remove such trees as well as fuel, such as brush and branches, along hundreds of miles after 2020 fires, but in 2022 deprived the plan, referring to the lawsuits of local environmental groups.

Earthjustice was not involved in this proceedings, but usually objects to the removal of hitches unless they are of clear danger to communities, such as on the road.

“We need burnt down trees,” said Miller McFeely, adding that the fire is a valuable part of forest health.

“If you enter the woods after it is burned, in the next couple of years it is just a beautiful place with wild flowers and birds… Because what it has done is open all the pinecons and release these seeds and everything starts to grow,” he said. “Rescue logging completely interferes with it. It is also extremely bad for erosion, soil and water quality and health.”

Trump’s executive Calls registration as the main fire prevention element, and one of the four areas of focus, outlined for the Forest Service, requires increasing rescue harvest, danger trees and forest restoration activities that need to be carried out sooner after such disorders such as fires.

While executive activities are often short -lived, as the next administration can simply be ignored, the timber industry is optimistic that the attitude towards forest management changes in different lines of the party.

Earlier this year, the house adopted our FIX forest law, which aims to reduce the threat of fire, speeding up some forest management projects and reducing litigation. Namely, it received bilateral sponsorship and 64 Democrats voted for the bill. The Senate version of the bill also received bilateral sponsorship.

“We are in the Megafires era,” said Smith, those who are now every summer, not just in rural areas, with fire smoke, which is now not just a rural area. He believes it is starting to combine leaders in the blue countries, which traditionally oppose logging.

Many environmental groups have talked about both versions of the FIX Law, claiming that they do not take into account science and deviate from important negotiation laws.

“You can’t place the tree back when you realize that you have cut the wrong way or the wrong tree, or the wrong place. It’s too late,” said Miller McFelium. Representatives “will only make poor registration in bad places and give the keys to the Trump administration to clearly empty our lands that we all have.”

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Freress reflected the devastating fires of the 2020 Oregon and said that “something good can come from these tragedies”.

“Politicians can finally get into support of our local citizens through good, hard work in the woods, where people may have a bit of sawdust in the veins and a little dirt under their nails and really start working to take care of these natural resources,” he said.