Biden Administration Pulls The Plug On Old-Growth Forest Protection Plan

The Biden administration on Tuesday withdrew a proposal that would have protected the nation’s oldest, most carbon-rich forests from future logging.

Forest Service Chief Randy Moore announced the decision in a memo to agency staff. The move follows a multiyear process in which the Forest Service, an agency with a long history of prioritizing timber production, was accused of dragging its feet to respond to an executive order that President Joe Biden signed in April 2021, which tasked the agency with crafting policies to better conserve and restore America’s old-growth forests.

Ancient forests help fight climate change by sequestering massive amounts of planet-warming greenhouse gases in their trees and soil. A coalition of dozens of environmental groups had lobbied the Biden administration to protect remaining old-growth stands across federal lands for their natural climate benefits.

But while Biden made safeguarding these ecosystems a key pillar of his climate agenda, he will exit office without getting lasting protections across the finish line. Nonetheless, in a press release earlier this week announcing the creation of two new national monuments in California, Biden highlighted his executive order on old-growth among a long list of conservation wins.

In his memo and an accompanying statement on Tuesday, Moore said that the Forest Service had learned a great deal about old-growth forests, including the threats these ecosystems face, but that the service would not advance the proposal before the end of Biden’s term in the White House.

“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 in the memo. “There was also feedback that there are important place-based differences that we will need to understand in order to conserve old-growth forests.”

The agency’s initial proposal, unveiled in December 2013, called for amending the management plans for all 128 national forests and grasslands across the country to better protect and restore old-growth stands, including restricting commercial logging — but not entirely banning it — across the 25 million acres of old-growth timber that the Forest Service manages. It stopped short of limiting timber harvest in younger “mature” stands of trees.

Responding to the Forest Service’s decision to jettison the proposal, Steve Pedery, conservation director at the environmental organization Oregon Wild, argued that “if the Forest Service were in charge of managing America’s coasts, we’d still have commercial whale hunts.”

“The agency’s unofficial motto is ‘logging is the answer, what was the question?’ and that was on full display throughout this process,” Pedery said in an email. “It is pretty damning that they are pulling the plug on a national mature and old-growth forest protection plan at the same time they are rolling ahead with a scheme to triple commercial logging levels on public lands here in the Pacific Northwest.”

As HuffPost reported last week, forest experts and advocates argue that the Forest Service never took Biden’s directive seriously, and they have accused the agency of ignoring the ongoing threat that logging poses to existing old-growth trees.

But they stressed that shelving the proposal was the best option with President-elect Donald Trump returning to office on Jan. 20. Finalizing the proposal in the last weeks of Biden’s term would have opened the door for the Republican-controlled Senate to launch a review under the Congressional Review Act, potentially stymying similar proposals in the future. The CRA gives Congress the power to nullify major regulations that an executive branch agency finalized in its waning months.

“Given the likelihood that if you do finish it, Congress will kill it or the Trump administration will kill it, just don’t give them the opportunity,” Jim Furnish, a former deputy chief of the Forest Service in the Clinton administration, previously told HuffPost. “Just let it die.”

Timber interests and allied Republicans in Congress fiercely opposed the Biden administration proposal, arguing that it sought to strip the Forest Service of its ability to manage forests as it sees fit to combat wildfire, disease and other threats.

In a statement posted to X, formerly Twitter, Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.) called the proposal’s withdrawal “a victory for [Montana] and commonsense, local management of our forests.”

“Now folks on the ground can get back to managing our forests rather than getting bogged down with needless paperwork,” he said.

Moore said that the knowledge the Forest Service gained as part of the rulemaking process would help the agency “better steward old growth forests into the future.”