Amid a wave of directives from the administration of President Donald Trump authorizing increased logging on the nation’s forests, Vermonters are assessing what impacts these actions could have on the state’s environment and economy.

On March 1, the Trump administration issued an executive order to expand timber harvesting, stating that federal policies have limited the domestic timber supply and have resulted in the U.S. relying on international imports of lumber.

As part of the executive order, Trump administration officials were tasked with examining existing environmental laws, such as the National Environmental Policy Act and the Endangered Species Act, to identify ways to streamline environmental review processes to implement expanded timber production.

Following the executive order, the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins declared an “emergency situation determination” in an April 4 memorandum that opened up logging on 112 million acres of national forests with the stated goal of reducing wildfire risks and bolstering rural economies.

The secretary wrote that the directives aimed to “spur immediate action” to streamline permitting and contracting, bypass National Environmental Policy Act review processes, and work with state and local players to boost the national timber supply.

In concert with the memorandum, the forest service issued guidance, asking regional foresters to keep pace with the new national goal to increase timber production by 25%. On April 22, regional foresters received additional direction to expedite work related to the emergency designation.

In response to VtDigger’s request for an interview, an unnamed United States Department of Agriculture Forest Service spokesperson wrote that the service did not have anyone available to comment on the impact of the directives on the Green Mountain National Forest. In the email, the spokesperson wrote that the service will work in alignment with the federal guidance to decrease “burdensome regulations” and “streamline forest management efforts.”

In a map included in the secretary’s announcement, the federal land available for logging under the emergency declaration includes a sizable portion of the Green Mountain National Forest, which are woodlands that stretch through the southeastern and central region of the state.

According to an analysis by the National Resources Defense Council, slightly more than 200,000 acres in Vermont are affected by the memorandum, which makes up 24% of Vermont’s federally owned land.

‘Emergencies that don’t exist’

Dana Doran, executive director of Professional Logging Contractors of the Northeast, said he is encouraged by the federal government’s public pronouncement supporting domestic timber production and active management of forests to reduce wildfire risks.

“It’s generally the public lands that are burning because of lack of management, where private lands that are actually managed have a less propensity to be susceptible to fire and blight,” Doran said.

But, Zack Porter, executive director of the Vermont-based forest conservation group Standing Trees, said the wildfire issue is less relevant to Vermont, and the emergency designation does not address climate and environmental concerns in the region.

“There is no such emergency in our national forest here in Vermont or anywhere in New England,” Porter said. “The Forest Service is proposing chainsaw medicine for a nonexistent ailment, and it is going to be a disaster for forests across this country if they increase the cut by 25% like they’re proposing.”

ChristopheCourchesne, an assistant professor at Vermont Law School, said the Trump administration’s attempts to simplify environmental review could face challenges in court because the National Environmental Policy Act and the Endangered Species Act requirements cannot be bypassed through an executive order.

Courchesne said the executive order and memorandum do not articulate a “clear factual basis” for an emergency declaration and appear to be beyond the scope of the narrow authority of the U.S. Forest Service to take emergency-related actions.

“Essentially what we see here is — as in numerous other contexts — the Trump administration is declaring emergencies that don’t exist, and that makes the actions undertaken under those emergency declarations legally vulnerable to challenge,” Courchesne said.

Environmental processes

The federal actions arrive at a time of a longstanding debate among Vermonters over what are best practices for the health of the state’s forests — rewilding or active management. In a search for compromise, Vermonters have grappled with whether the demands of the local logging industry can be balanced with forest conservation, and how both strategies impact the state’s modicum of old growth trees.

Due to logging practices in decades past, less than 0.1% of the region of New England and New York are estimated old growth forests, which improve ecosystem health and are more resilient to climate change, Porter said.

The “rewilding” advocates consider leaving nature alone in permanent preserves to be the best practice to regenerate old growth forests. But, foresters and loggers in the state see active management, including logging at a sustainable level, as necessary not only for the timber production but also to ensure young healthy trees are not competing with other trees for resources and have the space to grow.

How to balance these seemingly opposing concerns came to a head in recent years, when state lawmakers debated a bill that became law as Act 59.

The law set the goals of conserving 30% of the state’s land by 2030 and 50% by 2050 — aligning with the Biden’s administration’s set goals — and designates areas for rewilding, biodiversity conservation and areas of long-term, sustainable logging. Gov. Phil Scott permitted the bill to become law without his signature in 2023 after vetoing a similar bill in 2022.

Foresters, logging interests and conservation advocates in Vermont have also debated forestry management strategy around the Telephone Gap Project, a recent draft plan for regulating land use and logging activities on 72,000 acres, nearly half of which are inside the Green Mountain National Forest.

Porter said that recent national guidance is unlikely to have a direct impact on the fate of the Telephone Gap Project because it is far along in the management planning and environmental review process.

But, Porter said future forest management projects could be influenced by the scaling back of a federal review process through the National Environmental Policy Act and lead to overcutting of Vermont’s national forest.

William Keeton, a forest ecosystem scientist and professor at the University of Vermont, said he is troubled by the executive order and secretarial memorandum calling for forest management plans to be exempt from the National Environmental Policy Act.

“NEPA is an incredibly important law and we have that law for a reason,” Keeton said. “It ensures that we go about planning the way we do forestry on national forests in an intelligent way and allows us to make scientifically informed decisions.”

Sam Lincoln, former deputy commissioner of Vermont’s Department of Forests, Parks and Recreation and owner of Lincoln Farm Timber Harvesting, said he is in favor of simplifying processes for forest management to harvest timber at a sustainable level.

“I do think that the management has been slowed, and it just eats up the taxpayer money in these redundant reviews and appeals of a process that’s already done very, very deliberately and thoughtfully, and I think ways to make that a more streamlined process are fine,” Lincoln said.

While Doran, with the Professional Logging Contractors of the Northeast, said he is grateful for the attention brought by the Trump administration’s support for domestic timber production, he said the federal focus on shoring up the logging industry must be consistent over time as it would likely take years to restore strong markets nationally and regionally.

As there is a backlog of timber in the state and region, Doran said a short-term boost in production could drive down wages for workers, so there must be a long-term approach to restore the logging markets to help Vermont’s rural economy.

“The issue right now with increasing production to that level based upon the logging capacity that exists right now would be very challenging,” Doran said. “When you try to flood an already saturated manufacturing market with wood they can’t use, it’s going to suppress the price that’s paid to loggers to do the work, and that’s not a model that we support right now.”

There is not a scarcity of wood products in Vermont, Porter agreed, pointing to a study supported by the United States Department of Agriculture finding that Vermont’s loggers produce far more wood products than the state actually consumes: the harvesting of wood is 147% of the level that’s purchased.

Keeton, the forest ecosystem scientist, voiced concern with the Trump administration increasing the target for the nation’s timber production output by 25%. That target does not account for the local capacity of land and the importance of national forests’ varied uses, such as habitat for wildlife, clean water, flood control and outdoor recreation, he said.

Ethan Pepin, a resident of Rutland City and avid outdoor recreator, said he spends his time scaling boulders, Nordic skiing the backcountry and exploring the many wooded trails, sometimes for days on end on backpacking trips, in the Green Mountain National Forest network.

“The natural landscapes and the recreation opportunities they provide are a really big thing that draws people,” Pepin said. “A lot of the people I talk to are moving to Rutland because we have this access to this amazing natural world, and it really provides a lot of value that isn’t always fully captured in this raw, crude, economic sense.”

Pepin said he supports active forest management, such as the proposed Telephone Gap Project, which he said balances the need to selectively harvest trees to promote species diversity while valuing conservation and recreation of the national forest. However, Pepin said he is concerned about the federal guidance forgoing a balanced approach to logging plans in the future.

Pepin added that healthy forests provide the benefit of carbon sequestration, which helps slow the effects of climate change, including natural disasters like wildfires.

Rep. Amy Sheldon, D-Middlebury, the chair of the House Committee on the Environment, echoed that healthy, particularly old-growth, forests help mitigate natural disasters like flooding, which has been a significant challenge in the state with the recurrent flooding in July 2023 and 2024.

“It’s the opposite of what we need to be doing here to address the risk of fire or other climate change related risks,” Sheldon said.

Work on the ground

While the impacts of federal directives on Green Mountain National Forest remain uncertain, environmentalists are continuing their work to protect land from logging in Vermont.

Sheldon introduced the House bill H. 126 in February to further the state’s aim of conserving 30% of Vermont’s land by 2030 by establishing permanent wilderness reserves.

“Currently, we don’t have a permanent wilderness designation for state land, so this is just addressing that gap,” Sheldon said. “It’s not to say that we don’t have lands in Vermont that are managed for old forest growth, but they are still vulnerable to somebody rewriting the plan and deciding that they want to cut the trees, and I think we need some permanent wildland conservation.”

Jon Leibowitz, president of Northeast Wilderness Trust, said the trust is in the process of acquiring the College Hill Wilderness Preserve. The project would set aside 600 acres in the area of Jamaica, a rural, wooded town in Windham County, for rewilding in order to promote old growth forests.

As 85% of the state’s lands are under private ownership, Leibowitz said the trust’s approach is to acquire private land for wilderness preserves to ensure Vermont’s forests are protected regardless of the political climate around conservation on the state or federal level.

“In times like we’re in right now, I think many people find value and hope in private land conservation because it involves local organizations and local people making these decisions, and that’s one of the wonderful things about the land trust movement and working in the private domain,” Leibowitz said.

Mike DeBonis, the executive director of the Green Mountain Club, said the club is tracking the national messages but moving forward with trail maintenance projects for the Long Trail, which weaves through the Green Mountain National Forest, as hiking season is fast approaching.

DeBonis said that the Green Mountain Club, along with other nonprofit partners, works with the U.S. Forest Service in a “unique partnership-based model” to help manage the public land and ensure people can enjoy the natural resources the Green Mountain National Forest has to offer.

“It remains to be seen what exactly is going to be proposed for the Green Mountain National Forest, but I’m hopeful that that spirit of cooperation and collaboration would still exist,” DeBonis said.