Old fight rekindled between environmentalists and loggers over Trump executive order on timber

Fox News ^ | 6/14/25 | Hannah Ray Lambert

[Libloather]

**SNIP**

Timber once drove the economies of states like Oregon. But forest harvests nosedived beginning in the early 1990s due to stricter environmental regulations, a changing lumber market and other factors.

President Donald Trump hopes to reverse that trend by executive fiat, ordering the U.S. Forest Service to ramp up logging on federal lands in what environmental groups like Earthjustice call a "cynical attempt to justify destructive logging."

"It's really just about lining the pockets of timber industry executives," Blaine Miller McFeely, a senior legislative representative at Earthjustice, a nonprofit environmental law group, told Fox News Digital.

The timber slump Controversial logging methods like clear-cutting that were popular as settlers moved west drew vast public backlash starting around the 1970s. Environmental legislation, particularly the Northern spotted owl's designation as endangered in 1990, dealt a crippling blow to logging on federal lands.

The amount of timber harvested on Forest Service land has decreased nearly 80% since reaching a high in 1987, according to government data.

That's had a severe impact on timber towns.

Tyler Freres, whose grandfather opened the family's first sawmill back in 1922, said federal agencies used to offer 200 million board feet for timber production in Oregon's Santiam Canyon. Now, he said, that's down to 1 million board feet per year.

"I remember as a child the amount of prosperity that existed within our rural communities," Freres said. "There was a lot of timber dollars flowing back in the day and those dollars went directly into our local services."

[conservative_cyclist]

All that “Kindling” needs to be cleaned up to save the forests and prevent fires. Selling permits to clean up the dead stuff, win win