Outgoing President Joe Biden has axed plans to halt old-growth logging, reversing an executive order signed during the 2022 Earth Day after facing opposition from Republicans and the powerful timber industry. That is according to US Forest Service Chief Randy Moore, who confirmed the reversal in a letter sent to forest supervisors yesterday.
In the letter, Moore said “that much had been learned from the first-of-its-kind effort to identify old-growth trees on public lands,” whilst acknowledging criticism from those who said the Biden approach to old-growth forests was flawed since it failed to recognise that forestry can vary between different types of ecosystems.
“There is strong support for, and an expectation of us, to continue to conserve these forests based on the best available scientific information,” Moore wrote: “However, there was also feedback that there are important place-based differences that we will need to understand to conserve old-growth forests.”
In October, Wood Central revealed that Republicans and Democrats had clashed on logging; it comes after Biden, in June, promised to “effectively halt all logging in old-growth forests” after publishing a plan to apply to 32 million acres of forests managed by the US Forest Service and the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management. However, with President Donald Trump’s (re) election, those plans were on shaky ground, with federal officials (under Trump’s first term) seeking to open up vast areas of West Coast forests for potential logging.
In response to Biden’s decision to withdraw from the pledge, Montana Republican Senator Steve Daines, one of Biden’s most vocal critics of the executive order, said the withdrawal of the old-growth plan was “a victory for commonsense local management of our forests.”
- To learn more about Joe Biden’s old growth plans, click here for Wood Central’s special feature. To learn more about Donald Trump’s new Agricultural Secretary, click here.
