The world is grappling with the rapidly accelerating global climate and biodiversity crises, as greenhouse gas emissions exceed atmospheric safety margins and forests are cut down. From supercharged hurricanes causing untold damage in the southeast to climate-driven wildfires that burn down western towns, we need a moon shot to thwart disastrous climatic consequences. The presidential debates barely mentioned climate change, with former President Donald Trump espousing “drill, baby drill,” and Vice President Kamala Harris reversing position on fracking. As President Joe Biden leaves office, he can build on his climate legacy by protecting the nation’s mature and old-growth forests (“older”), as part of the White House’s road map on nature-based solutions and its global commitment to end forest losses via the Glasgow Leaders’ Forest Pledge. The Forest Service will not protect a single acre of old forest without presidential direction despite their inadequate old-growth amendment process.
The president has so far issued two exemplary orders jump-starting a process to protect 30% of lands and water by 2030 (we are currently at only 12%), while directing federal agencies to inventory the nation’s older forests for “conservation purposes.” And while the Biden administration thankfully restored protections for over 9 million acres of roadless areas on the Tongass rainforest in Alaska, removed by the Trump administration, older forests remain at risk of more logging before Biden leaves office.
Nearly all but about 5% of our older forests were logged as the nation expanded east to west over a century ago and in the post-World War II housing boom. Most of what remains is on federal lands and — contrary to industry assertions — does not need “stewardship” logging. In the northeast, where most old growth was logged over a century ago, maturing forests need but a few more decades to reacquire old-growth characteristics. Yet the Forest Service is proposing destructive logging within Vermont’s Green Mountains. The same is happening in over a dozen national forests from the Pacific Northwest and Tongass in Alaska, to Appalachia. From sea to shining sea, a shotgun blast of clear-cuts is interspersed with fragments of the natural world. Those fragments hold some of the keys to our climate security.
Despite Biden’s efforts to get the Forest Service to change its destructive logging ways, the agency’s old-growth forest amendment is an ill-informed plan to increase logging on all national forests with older forests. According to some estimates, over 50 million acres of older forests on federal lands could be cut down during the height of the climate crisis in the coming decades. Continued old forest logging is based on the false premise that this “active management” will somehow slow natural disturbances like wildfires and insect outbreaks, when, in fact, those disturbances are amplified by logging and climate change.
Forests, many decades to centuries old, are populated by ancient trees that can tower over 15-story buildings. The older trees cleanse the air we breathe, purify our drinking water and sustain family farms by slowly releasing clean water during dry summer months. They shade our swimming holes and keep them cool for spawning fish. On a hot summer day, they give us natural air-conditioning to escape urban heat islands. And older forests harbor by far the most wildlife, including hundreds of imperiled species, while playing a vital role in fighting climate change by absorbing and storing vast amounts of our carbon pollution.
As trees age, they develop thick insulating bark that protect them and us from intense wildfires compared to tree plantations populated by densely stocked small trees that act as kindling in fast-moving flames. Prudent climate and wildfire planning would redirect millions of infrastructure dollars to thinning flammable tree plantations and proven defensible space and home-hardening safety measures that prevent towns from burning down in extreme climate-driven fire events.
President Biden can finish the forest climate job before leaving office by redirecting the Forest Service to end commercial logging of mature and old-growth forests on federal lands. The president can close out his administration with a much-needed legacy gift that would show the world that we are serious about our international forest climate commitments. He can also pass the baton to Vice President Harris in upholding protections for the best natural solution to the climate crisis, should she be elected.