by BLACK ENTERPRISE Editors
Trump administration declares timber emergency after decades of employment decline in the industry.
Earlier this year, the Trump administration issued an executive order to increase timber production by at least 25%, citing wildfire risk reduction and economic development as the primary drivers behind the order. Whether President Donald Trump’s forest management policies will improve rural economies in communities formerly dependent on logging is a point of contention, however.
The Daily Yonder reporters Sarah Melotte and Ilana Newman spent a week in mid-August interviewing sources for a series of articles about mining, natural resources, and human health in the rural Northwest. On their first day out in the field, they met logger Bruce Vincent, owner of Vincent Logging, at his office in the small town of Libby, Montana. Vincent Logging is a small timber operation that Bruce’s parents started in 1968.
After lunch, Bruce took the reporters to an active logging area where his son, Chas Vincent, was operating a machine, aptly referred to as a delimber, that strips branches from felled trees. After delimbing the logs, Chas separated them into neat stacks by species.
Sarah Melotte, Rural Index // The Daily Yonder
According to Rollins, issuing the ESD will clean out forests at high risk of wildfire and support rural economies, but experts say the truth is more complex than that.
Assistant Professor at Washington State University, Austin Himes, told Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB) that Trump’s orders don’t address the main issues that led to timber decline. Himes said logging economies need a steady supply of timber over several decades, not a temporary jolt in production. But the Trump administration’s forestry plans don’t address sustainable long-term planning, according to Himes.
“What we’re going to see, I suspect, are areas that are hit particularly hard by very intensive harvesting practices that lead more to sort of lose-lose situations for communities who enjoy those forests and the ecological sustainability of those forests,” Himes told OPB.
However, many industry experts and rural residents disagree, arguing that Rollins’s memorandum will ensure forests are managed sustainably while promoting rural economies by streamlining environmental regulations, such as the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which is viewed by many in the timber industry as an unnecessary bureaucracy.
“By streamlining permitting and empowering forest managers, this initiative will create jobs, support rural economies, and ensure our forests are properly managed for future generations,” House Agriculture Committee Chairman Glenn Thompson told the American Ag Network, a multimedia news source.
However, the national timber emergency declaration may not be legally viable, according to Albert C. Lin, a professor of law at the University of California, Davis. In an article for The Conversation, Lin said the Trump administration’s ESD doesn’t qualify as a legal emergency under the Army Corps of Engineers definition, which stipulates that a situation qualifies as an emergency if it results in “an unacceptable hazard to life, a significant loss of property, or an immediate, unforeseen, and significant economic hardship.”
According to a memorandum issued by the Army Corps of Engineers, an emergency situation can include natural disasters, like earthquakes and floods, or “catastrophic … failure to a facility,” like a collapsed bridge. The Trump administration’s ESD doesn’t qualify as an emergency under The Corps’s own guidance, Lin argued.
Bruce said there was more to a timber economy than just felling trees.
“You need a market to deliver the product to,” he said. “We used to have a sawmill in town. We had a plywood plant in town. We had a pres-to-log plant in town. We have none of that … so we need to have a small processing plant in town. And in order to get that, we’ve got to have this certainty that the forest is going to be managed.”
In May of this year, Bruce and Vincent Logging fostered a partnership between Lincoln County, Montana, where Libby serves as the county seat, and the U.S. Forest Service to manage forest lands with the dual goals of economic development and wildfire risk reduction. Lincoln County is surrounded by the 2.2 million-acre Kootenai National Forest.
Lincoln County Commissioner Brent Teske said that he hopes the county’s partnership with the Forest Service will have a “trickle down effect … with industry investing in wood fiber manufacturing, providing jobs to a community that is suffering economic hardship.”
This story was produced with support from the LOR Foundation. LOR works with people in rural places to improve the quality of life.
This story was produced by The Daily Yonder and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.
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Source: Black Enterprise
