JACKSON, Wyo. — On Saturday, March 1, President Donald Trump signed an executive order aimed at increasing logging and road building on hundreds of millions of acres of national forests and other public lands.
According to the order, timber production is “critical” to the U.S.’s well-being, including as a method of wildfire risk reduction. The order also calls for new strategies of forest management on U.S. Forest Service (USFS) and Bureau of Land Management (BLM) land to improve the approval of forestry projects and bypass requirements of review under the Endangered Species Act, within 60 days of the date of the order.
Within 180 days, adoption of “categorical exclusions” from the National Environmental Policy Act are additionally called for to expedite administrative approvals for “timber production, forest management and wildfire risk reduction treatments.”
Tucker J. Furniss, PhD, assistant professor in the Ecosystem Science and Management Department at University of Wyoming, says the relationship between forest management and wildfire mitigation is “complicated.” While Furniss stresses there are always exceptions where prior management increased or decreased burn severity, he tells Buckrail that generally management that maximizes timber production and is coupled with blanket fire suppression policies, like policies that dominated most of the 20th century, “are the problem, not the solution.”
“Managing a forest to maximize timber production will not reduce wildfire risk, as dense and homogeneous stands that result from heavy harvesting practices have higher — not lower — fire risk.”
Tucker J. Furniss, PhD
“Managing a forest to maximize timber production will not reduce wildfire risk, as dense and homogeneous stands that result from heavy harvesting practices have higher — not lower — fire risk,” Furniss says. “We should instead prioritize landscape heterogeneity, structural complexity and forest health, as these attributes mitigate susceptibility to fire and other contagious disturbances like bark beetles. Forest management that prioritizes these ecological principles can produce some timber revenue, and it can create a lot of jobs, but this is not the same as a timber-oriented management strategy.”
The BLM Wyoming states on its website that the state’s forest management emphasizes a balance between the ecological, economic and social aspects of forests, managing timber production with recreation, wildlife habitat, water quality and forest health to consider the needs of future generations.
While the executive order values national forests primarily for their timber, economic benefits also come from the land’s recreation, wildlife habitat, water filtration and erosion prevention. Research shows the primary value, even from a purely economic standpoint, of forests in Wyoming is not timber; annual timber revenues are less than $100 million, and WyoFile confirms commercial logging in national forests around the country, including Wyoming, has decreased dramatically from the 1950s to 1980s into 2024.
On the flip side, national parks contribute over $1 billion to the state’s economy, and the most recent numbers from a University of Wyoming and Wyoming Office of Tourism report show the amount of money generated by Wyoming’s outdoor recreation economy grew by over 6 percent in 2023 to $2.2 billion.
Another estimate puts the economic value of Wyoming’s forests at over $20 billion.
“Simply put, timber production is not the primary way that our forests provide economic returns to people in our state,” Furniss says. “Prioritizing timber production above forest restoration and adaptation treatments will undermine the many social and ecological benefits that forests provide, and doing so will likely do more harm than good to communities in Wyoming.”
The executive order does still leave a lot open to interpretation, with no fixed numbers for timber output and a call for “sound forest management,” which could potentially still leave discretion for managers at all levels of the USFS. And streamlining the planning and implementation processes for forest treatments could have benefits for forest health as well, since Furniss points out many “ecologically oriented forest restoration projects are held up by planning and litigation.”
