Not only the axe for government spending cuts, but also the chainsaw for felling trees. Over the weekend, US President Donald Trump approved an executive order that calls for the felling of thousands of hectares of American forests, potentially circumventing species protection guidelines, in an attempt to obtain timber more quickly and reduce imports from Canada, a country with which a major tug-of-war over tariffs is underway. The directive sought by the new US president aims to meet the increased domestic supply of timber to benefit home builders and the construction industry. So the chainsaw symbol of Argentine President Javier Milei, Trump is taking it up for real: the goal is an ‘immediate expansion in timber production’.
The concerns of scientists and environmentalists
“The production of timber, paper, bioenergy, and other wood products is critical to our nation’s well-being,” Trump writes in black and white, justifying the use of the axe across the entire country’s nearly 113 million hectares of national forests and public lands.
A move that only adds to the concerns of scientists and environmentalists over the ongoing dismantling of US climate and environmental policies over the past month. After the exit from the Paris Accords, the removal and obscuring of climate crisis concepts from federal websites, and the thousands of layoffs of public employees, especially researchers, foresters, and experts from federal agencies on climate, weather, and nature protection, while America aims to ‘drill’ everywhere and push on fossil fuels, there is now the risk that even the great allies in the fight against global warming, those billions of trees that absorb CO2 and preserve biodiversity, will soon be cut down to feed the timber industry.
‘Wood too protected by regulations’
Trump’s vision points to how the States have ‘an abundance of timber resources’ to exploit, but so far timber has, in his view, been over-protected by regulations – such as those relating to the protection of endangered species in forests – that have prevented rapid access to these resources. The finger is pointed in particular at the Endangered Species Act, which requires thorough environmental assessments to ensure, for example, that activities such as logging do not harm wildlife and ecosystems, assessments that can take years to complete in approval processes for logging projects. Consequently, with the order signed on 1 March, Trump aims to have ‘new guidelines’ issued that can facilitate increased timber production, bypassing those protective regulations.
Environmentalists: ‘It will worsen climate effects’
For the environmental rights non-profit Earthjustice, ‘this executive order puts a free-for-all on our federal forests. Americans value our forests for all the benefits they provide, like recreation, clean air, and clean drinking water. But this order ignores these values and opens the door to the plunder of wild lands, all for nothing more than corporate gain. In the long run, this will worsen the effects of climate change, even destroying critical wildlife habitat,’ argues Blaine Miller-McFeeley of Earthjustice.
The order issued by the US president is based on the notion that dependence on timber from other countries is a factor that ‘threatens national security’, so – while the president is considering tariffs on timber imports from Canada, Brazil, and other countries – the idea is a kind of green light to bypass current levels of protection (of species and trees) to create a ‘reliable’ domestic timber market.
For Randi Spivak of the Centre for Biological Diversity, this order ‘will unleash chainsaws and bulldozers on our federal forests’, undermining the role of trees in combating the climate crisis and increasing the loss of the biodiversity that was recently the focus of 150 countries’ agreements at the Convention on Biodiversity, the COP16 held in Rome, where US delegates were not present.
78 million hectares of forests at risk
Even though scientists have recalled how in the devastating fires that have hit the country there is a hand in the climate crisis, which between drier soils and rising temperatures makes the weather phenomena and devastation more intense, the Trump administration claims that increasing the number of cuts is a way to “reduce the risk of forest fires”, a system that is also indicated in the famous Project2025, the conservative guidelines of the Heritage Foundation that suggested cuts to the main scientific institutes.
In all, last week Trump appointed Tom Schultz, a former timber industry executive, to head the Forest Service, the agency that is supposed to oversee at least 78 million hectares of national forests and public lands. Meanwhile, although many of the US administration’s choices have been explained as the need to ‘improve forest management’, in America where thousands of foresters have just been laid off, funding for tree planting is also being cut off.
Stop funding
In many areas of the United States, such as those affected 20 years ago by Hurricane Katrina, programmes and projects were underway to restore tree canopies and forests that had been destroyed. In fact, one of the largest grants, $75 million to be given to the Arbor Day Foundation by the Forest Service, was recently stopped by the government: the grant was part of former President Joe Biden’s climate bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, but Trump – with yet another swipe of the chainsaw – decided to cut it, just as he will do for many of America’s big trees in the future.
Below : Trump fires 1000 rangers. The protest: upside-down flag on Yosemite Park’s iconic mountain.
Trump’s policy looks a lot like that of Forza Italia when he wanted to dismantle Italy’s protected areas.
