When you cross into National Forest land, you are greeted with a sign boasting that you are entering into a “Land of Many Uses.” This proclamation hints at a mild contradiction within the U.S. Forest Service’s management of the forestland covering over a third of the United States. Since its inception over a century ago, the agency has both overseen conservation efforts and managed resource extraction by private concerns, mostly timber companies. The USFS has proved a mostly capable steward, resisting private capital’s siren song of destruction and subjugation. The most important few of the aforementioned many uses are recreation, science, and simple existence. The best thing you can do for a forest is observe it and keep it from incinerating.
All that careful balance is gone. The forest as we know it is the latest target of war from the Trump administration. Early last week, the Department of Agriculture announced a series of moves that amount to the dismantling of the USFS.
The first and most important change is that the headquarters of the agency will relocate by some 2,000 miles, from Washington, D.C., to Salt Lake City, which not coincidentally is the nerve center of the anti–public lands movement in the U.S. Several of the most powerful figures in the war on public lands, including Utah Sen. Mike Lee, Rep. Celeste Maloy, and Gov. Spencer Cox, have based their efforts there; the 1980 Sagebrush Rebellion, a movement led by ranchers and oilmen to transfer control of Western public lands to state governments more amenable to their privatization and exploitation, began in the city. This mirrors Trump’s first-term strategy with the Bureau of Land Management, which he turned over to extractivist crusader William Perry Pendley and briefly relocated alongside a Chevron corporate office in Colorado.
Joe Biden reversed that geographic shift, which was relatively easy to do, as it had preceded Trump’s ouster from the presidency by mere months. That ease will probably not repeat itself this time around. In addition to relocation, the USFS is undergoing a broader reorganization. Its nine regional headquarters will be replaced by 15 state coordinators, who will be tasked with coordinating the destruction of their forests.
That’s not conjecture or hyperbole: Trump put out a statement within weeks of taking office calling for the immediate expansion of domestic timber production. The new leader of the USFS is former timber lobbyist Tom Schultz. In a recent budget proposal, the Trump administration asked Congress to more than quadruple the amount earmarked for timber preparation and sales. Two weeks ago, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced $115 million in grants and loans to sawmills in order to process the trees they want to kill. In a statement on the reorganization, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke L. Rollins emphasized first and foremost that the aim was to manage forests by eliminating them.
Establishing a western headquarters in Salt Lake City and streamlining how the Forest Service is organized will position the Chief and operation leaders closer to the landscapes we manage and the people who depend on them. This includes supporting our timber growers across the country, including those in the Southeast by prioritizing a regional office and promoting policies that boost timber production, lowering costs for consumers.
Since there is no point in seeking a deeper understanding of something you are trying to kill, the USFS will also cease most of its research functionality. This is one of the more underappreciated yet vital roles of the Forest Service. The USFS oversees several so-called “experimental forests,” which provide critical silvicultural data on long-term resilience, response to environmental changes, and innumerable other functions and resiliencies of forests. The New Yorker‘s Bill McKibben spoke to a Clinton-era head of the USFS who said “unequivocally that the greatest value of those millions of acres was not timber or even recreation but the way that intact forests absorb and filter water.”
These forests can be as small as Indiana’s 231-hectare Paoli Experimental Forest and as large as Utah’s 22,500-hectare Desert Experimental Range. The oldest such forest is Arizona’s Fort Valley Experimental Forest, established in 1908; roughly 40 percent of the experimental forests date back to the 1930s. In 1982, the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest in Oregon began a study of log decomposition that was planned to run for 200 years—several human lifespans but a relative blink in the life of a forest.
This speaks to the underlying temporal and spatial incongruity that makes the gleeful rapaciousness of the second Trump administration so unsettling. Forests are not static objects; a forest is not just a bunch of trees close together. Forests change—living and dying, burning and regrowing, flourishing at times and flagging in others—and they do so much more slowly and on a much grander scale than any single person can perceive. It’s useful, necessary even, not to think of forests as collections of millions of individual trees but more like soft-edged, symbiotic organisms that live at the awe-inspiring scale of mountain ranges, watersheds, and state-sized expanses. A person can interact with parts of a forest, but a forest is too grand for any single person to face as a whole.
Managing forests with any sort of harmony necessarily requires long-term vision and cohesion. In other words, managing a forest requires a forest in more ways than one: larger groups of people, acting with common purpose, across longer timelines. Killing a forest, on the other hand, is a lot easier. It doesn’t take centuries to log an old-growth stand or strip-mine a mountain for its minerals. It takes weeks.
The arrogance on display here is seeing oneself as an adversary, consumer, or owner of the forest, rather than as part of it. We can’t live without forests. Logging them aggressively, past their point of resilience, would not only be catastrophic. It would also be suicidal.