The Biden Administration Is Dragging Its Feet On A Key Climate Solution

On Earth Day last year, President Joe Biden signed an executive order aimed at protecting and restoring mature and old-growth forests on federal lands across the country — one that many environmentalists , in Oregon’s Willamette National Forest, which would have allowed for about 2,000 acres of mature and old-growth Douglas fir and western hemlock to be cut down. In January, the Forest Service withdrew its decision to greenlight the controversial project, noting at the time that “some parts of it may be incongruent with recent directives and climate-related plans concerning conservation of mature and old-growth forests and carbon stewardship.” The withdrawal came on the heels of a pressure campaign from environmental groups that included protesters occupying the forest in an attempt to block the project from moving ahead.

The Biden administration also reversed a Trump-era rule that lifted Clinton-era logging restrictions across 9 million acres of Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, the world’s largest intact temperate rainforest.

Meanwhile, many other mature and old-growth logging projects and timber sales have moved forward under Biden’s watch.

Some forest ecologists and conservationists view the situation not so much as a disconnect between the White House and the Forest Service, but between the administration and the growing body of science showing old-growth forests’ resistance to fire and their capacity for storing massive amounts of carbon in trees and soil.

“The Forest Service deserves the criticism. Let’s be clear, they don’t have to propose these giant logging projects,” said Chad Hanson, forest ecologist at the John Muir Project’s Earth Island Institute. “But the Biden administration has the ultimate responsibility to tell the Forest Service to shift direction, to shift away from 20th century logging policies and move into a 21st century approach to our national forests, which would emphasize biodiversity, forest carbon storage, recreation and recreation jobs.”

To date, there is no sign that the White House has made that demand.

“That’s the problem,” Hanson said. “Don’t tell me mature and old-growth forests are important and now let’s do a lot more logging in them.”

Furnish agrees the White House must do more to force the Forest Service’s hand.

“Is the White House … going to tell the Forest Service what to do? Or are they simply going to ask the Forest Service what to do?” Furnish said. “Everything I’ve seen to date implies they are simply asking the Forest Service what to do. And given the Forest Service’s track record, particularly during the Trump administration, it is not surprising that they’re kind of continuing as if nothing has changed, until and unless some subsequent action is taken.”

Furnish still talks to current Forest Service officials, and he told HuffPost that he’s heard directly from Chris Swanston, the Forest Service climate adviser and acting director of the agency’s Office of Sustainability and Climate, that the agency’s leadership is less enthusiastic than the White House about the need for a climate resilience rulemaking — and that there is no guarantee the Forest Service will follow through on proposing one.

The Forest Service did not make Swanston available for an interview. In an email statement, USDA spokesperson Larry Moore said “it is premature to speculate on timing for any potential future regulatory actions” as federal law requires the agency to consider all comments submitted during the rulemaking process.

“The Forest Service is responding to the direction in the executive orders and Secretarial Memo with data-informed tools, strategies, policy recommendations, and systems for accountability for fire and climate resilience, climate adaptation, reforestation, ecosystem and watershed restoration, ecosystem services, mature and old growth forests, and carbon stewardship, as well as related investments in community engagement, partnerships, collaboration and equity,” Moore said.

Asked about Furnish’s account of his conversation with Swanston, Moore said it would be “inappropriate for us to comment on third-party conversations and rumors.”

Earlier this month, the Forest Service extended the public comment period on the ANPR from 60 to 90 days. The deadline is now July 20.

Furnish said there doesn’t appear to be any urgency on the Forest Service’s part to get a rule across the finish line, let alone to do so before the end of Biden’s term in office. Not doing so could sink the prospects of a rule ever being put in place.

“I know enough about politics to know that if the Republicans take the White House, this whole thing is going to be buried immediately,” he said.

The White House told HuffPost that federal agencies “are working swiftly ― guided by public input and science ― to restore and conserve America’s forests, including our mature and old-growth forests, and to meet our ambitious climate goals.”

“The Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management recently completed two critical first steps in that work: creating a first-ever nationwide definition of what mature and old growth forests are and completing a nationwide inventory,” a spokesperson for the White House’s Council on Environmental Quality said via email. “The next step is gathering input from the public, Tribal Nations, states, and stakeholders on what policy and management changes should be made to better conserve and restore these forests, including harnessing their potential to help tackle the climate crisis.”

The White House did not comment on whether it has encountered resistance within the Forest Service.

In the summer of 1991, the Siuslaw National Forest on Oregon’s central coast found itself backed into a corner. For decades, Forest Service managers there had allowed for intensive logging of mature and old-growth trees — vital habitat for the majestic northern spotted owl.

That year, a federal judge in Seattle banned all logging in spotted owl habitat, concluding that the scale of timber harvest under the George H.W. Bush administration threatened to drive the species to extinction. The owl came under federal protection one year earlier when it was listed as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act.

The court ruling and the Northwest Forest Plan, adopted by the Clinton administration in 1994 to help protect old-growth trees and threatened wildlife across millions of forested acres in the Pacific Northwest, ultimately brought about a seismic shift in the Siuslaw, which at the time was among the most heavily logged forests in the nation. Management that was focused squarely on the economic value of harvesting giant trees was ultimately replaced with restoration forestry and ecosystem-wide stewardship.

It was Furnish who spearheaded that shift as supervisor of the Siuslaw.

“I took the aim of trying to grow mature and old-growth timber seriously, and I felt that one of the big liabilities we had was the past 40 years of clear-cut logging,” Furnish said. “We very ambitiously set out to thin a lot of the old clear-cut units. And we did so. And they’ve been doing that for the last 30-something years.”

Furnish was widely ridiculed at the time; however, the benefits proved enormous. The national forest is now richer in mature and old-growth trees. Populations of at-risk species — the northern spotted owl, coho salmon and marbled murrelet — rebounded. And by focusing on thinning unnatural, monoculture tree plantations that were planted after extensive clear-cutting ― a method that involves cutting down all or most of the trees in a selected area — the forest has continued to be a source of timber.

“What we didn’t know at the time is the benefits that would redound to forest carbon and forest sequestration,” Furnish said. “We didn’t think about it, we didn’t talk about it, we didn’t consider it. It was not even in our mind.”

A 2018 report from the Oregon Global Warming Commission found that since the early 1990s, forests in Oregon have transitioned from being a likely net source of carbon to a major sink.

“It’s not surprising that when you stopped the real aggressive clear-cut logging of mature and old-growth forests in the Northwest, they started to grow. They started to grow like crazy and began laying on ton after ton after ton of carbon,” Furnish said. “It served to be a real boon to the climate change issue and illustrative of what forests can do, in a sense, when they are unleashed.”

Forest advocates see the Siuslaw as a model that can and should take hold across the Forest Service.

“Thirty years later, everyone celebrates the Siuslaw as the wonderful win-win — meets its timber quota, doesn’t log old growth, coho salmon are recovering, everyone loves it,” yet the agency has resisted imposing that example on forested land elsewhere, Pedery said.

“It’s still very much ‘we are forest managers, we get out there and engineer the kinds of forests we want.’ And now, all of the money and political direction is to engineer the forests for fire. And that’s what they’re doing,” he said. “This rulemaking, they’re doing it begrudgingly, but definitely there’s a view, I think, from agency leadership that what they’re being asked to do is at odds with that baked-in desire to get out there with some chainsaws and fix some stuff.”

The White House has repeatedly vowed to do more to combat deforestation and better preserve intact forests as part of its broader climate agenda. Meanwhile, federal agencies are advancing more than 20 logging projects targeting tens of thousands of acres of ancient trees — often under the umbrella of wildfire mitigation and resilience.

Those in the pipeline include the Bitterroot Front Project, in Montana’s Bitterroot National Forest, where 55,000 acres of trees, including mature and old growth, are on the chopping block. The project is billed as a “fuels reduction, vegetation management, and forest health improvement” effort.

In Montana’s Kootenai National Forest, the Black Ram project would allow for nearly 4,000 acres of western larch, ponderosa pine and western white pine, including some 500 acres of mature and old-growth trees, to be logged. In its decision to approve the project last year, the Forest Service wrote that harvesting the timber is “the most effective strategy in increasing resilience.”

The Upper Cheat River Project, in West Virginia’s Monongahela National Forest, targets 3,400 acres of mature forest, including stands that are more than 100 years old.

Critics charge that one of the main roadblocks to the Forest Service embracing preservation of remaining ancient trees is its narrow focus on combating wildland fire.

In January 2022, Agricultural Secretary Tom Vilsack and Moore, head of the Forest Service, unveiled a 10-year strategy for confronting America’s wildfire crisis through increased logging, forest “thinning” and prescribed fires to reduce high fuel loads. It calls for “forest health treatments” on an additional 50 million acres of forested land, both public and private, across the nation over the next 10 years — more than double current levels.

More recently, Vilsack and Haaland issued a joint memo to federal agencies outlining goals for managing fire this year. The document highlights several drivers of extreme wildland fire, including climate change, drought, extreme heat and expanding development in areas prone to fire, but makes no mention of fire suppression.

The amount of money spent on fighting fires in the U.S. has exploded in recent decades. And with the passage of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act in 2021 and last year’s Inflation Reduction Act ― Biden’s signature climate law ― Congress injected a combined $5 billion into reducing the risk of wildfire.

With that money now in hand, the Forest Service is under intense pressure to deliver, Furnish said.

“I almost think they are viewing the executive order as a problem that’s getting in the way of their fire response, as opposed to an opportunity to really consider recasting the future of the agency around climate change, carbon storage, mature and old-growth forests and some of those values,” he said. “I sense that the Forest Service sees these goals of fire risk reduction and responding proactively to the executive order as mutually exclusive. I disagree with that premise entirely.”

In response to HuffPost’s inquiry, which included a question about whether the Forest Service views fire as a bigger threat to mature forests than logging, Moore pointed to an NPR story about how the recent fires in California killed nearly one-fifth of remaining giant sequoias.

“The increased risk of carbon loss through natural and human-caused disturbances, such as wildfires and insect epidemics, can jeopardize carbon storage and other ecosystem services,” he said. “For this reason, the USDA Forest Service understands that wildfire and other climate-related stressors are a chief threat to old-growth and mature stands on national forests and grasslands.”

Furnish, Hanson and Dominick DellaSala, chief scientist at forest advocacy group Wild Heritage, accuse the agency of cherry-picking science that supports increased logging.

The ANPR “did not go far enough in stating the irreplaceable biodiversity and carbon values of [mature and old growth], did not cite the importance of carbon accumulation rates that increase with tree sizes, nor the outsized role of large tree and older forests as carbon reservoirs that represents best available science,” DellaSala wrote in draft comments to the agency, which he shared with HuffPost.

Hanson highlighted research that shows harvesting mature trees in an effort to save them from fire actually emits roughly three times more carbon per acre than wildfire alone and that thinning and other fuel reduction activities can at times increase fire severity by altering a forest’s microclimate.

Furnish acknowledges that wildfire is a complex threat. He doesn’t see the solution as black or white. Thinning of smaller trees, especially when followed by prescribed fire, is widely embraced as a proven tool for reducing fuel loads and preventing severe wildfire. But he said prevailing Forest Service dogma is that they view any prohibition on logging primary forests as a fundamental hurdle to reducing wildfire risk.

“I simply don’t think they see a way through if they don’t have free and ready access to chainsaws cutting down a lot of mature and old-growth trees to reduce the density of a lot of these stands,” he said.

That tunnel vision, he said, is clearest when visiting logging projects and timber sales in places like the Green Mountain National Forest in Vermont, the Black Hills National Forest in South Dakota and Apache–Sitgreaves National Forest in Arizona.

In 2021, Furnish toured an area of the Black Hills where loggers were allowed to conduct “overstory removal” — cutting down nearly every mature tree — across about 3,000 acres that was heavily thinned 15 years ago to mitigate an infestation of mountain pine beetles. Rob Hoelscher, district ranger for the Forest Service’s Hell Canyon District, told the Hill City Prevailer newspaper in South Dakota that harvesting the older trees was necessary to provide younger trees the space and sunshine to thrive.

Furnish called the logging project “deplorable” and condemned the Forest Service’s justification.

“To me it is patently obvious that field managers — from forest supervisors, rangers, foresters on down — they simply don’t get climate change, forest carbon, mature and old growth,” he said. “Any evidence that the Forest Service is taking that seriously on the ground is completely lacking.”