Scientists are sounding a warning over increased logging on public land, even after President Joe Biden cracked down on the practice in the United States.
What's happening?
According to a report from Scripps News, scientists with the John Muir Institute said that logging in mature, old-growth forests on public land has increased under the Biden administration, despite pledges to further restrict the practice.
"They're taking thousands and thousands of mature trees off the landscape. They're hauling away the tree trunks for lumber, and then they're stripping out the branches and the treetops, and then taking the small trees and putting them in giant piles," Chad Hanson, a forest ecologist and director of the John Muir Project, said.
According to records obtained by Scripps, 2.3 billion board feet were logged in 2021, while in 2024, there were nearly 3 billion board feet logged.
This comes despite numerous executive orders from the president as well as a pledge to "halt forest loss" and restore "at least 200 million hectares of forests and other ecosystems by 2030."
Why is deforestation important?
Old-growth, mature forests are some of our most crucial resources in the fight against our warming planet. They serve as a carbon sink, absorbing massive amounts of carbon dioxide to help them grow and produce more oxygen in the process.
However, once they're cut down, these old-growth trees have the opposite effect; their trapped carbon is released back into the atmosphere as they're milled down into usable commercial wood.
The U.S. Forest Service has said that the logging efforts on public land have been done in an effort to reduce wildfire risk, but Hanson said that thinning the forest can actually have the opposite effect.
"It tends to make the fires burn faster, it kills more trees, and it prevents from being killed," Hanson said, "It increases carbon emissions, and it puts communities at greater risk because the fires spread faster through those thinned areas."
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What's being done about logging on public land?
The biggest push against logging on public lands remains policy; the Biden administration has extended old-growth protections, although it seems unlikely that many of those protections will continue under Donald Trump's incoming administration.
Conservationists have been pushing back against the logging efforts and recently scored a massive win in getting a project in the Ashley National Forest shut down. In Australia, the government of New South Wales has faced backlash for allowing logging to occur in the Great Koala National Park as well as taking heat in Victoria for a planned operation that threatened trees used as habitat for the endangered greater glider.
The best way to prevent further loss of old-growth forests is to push your state and local legislators to keep logging out of public lands as much as possible.
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