Action Alerts

Protect forests from massive expansion of logging

What's At Stake

Old-growth and mature trees and forests provide homes for wildlife, filter drinking water, provide recreational opportunities and absorb and store carbon, helping us to fight climate change. If we chop them down, we will lose all those benefits and worsen the existing climate crisis and make the threat of wildfires worse.  

 

Read More

And that is what the Trump administration is lining up to do. President Trump signed an executive order that seeks to ramp up logging, including clear-cutting, across federal forests. This order aims to increase timber production, erode Endangered Species Act protections, and increase targets for timber offered for sale annually.   

The executive order lays out an aggressive plan that could clear-cut irreplaceable forests and make communities more susceptible to wildfires. In a subsequent Secretarial Memo the Department of Agriculture announced it now considers 59 percent of U.S. Forest Service Lands (more than 112 million acres) to be in an “emergency situation” which greases the wheels for the Forest Service to log trees they consider hazardous and circumvent approval processes required under federal law. If the Trump administration breaks the law to hold illegal timber sales, we will see them in court. We also need you to defend the forest protections we have fought so hard for and tell the administration that you oppose increased logging in our federal forests and weakening of environmental protections.  

The administration’s desire to increase timber production means cutting down older and bigger trees – like mature and old-growth trees. Once an old-growth tree is cut and sold, it will take longer than most human lifetimes to replace it.  If this massive increase in potentially illegal timber sales go through, it could result in significant harm to forest ecosystems and damage the outdoor recreation economy.  

Earthjustice has gone to court protecting our forests for years, advocating for the Roadless Rule to protect our wildest forests, opposing harmful forest management plans, and challenging illegal timber sales in the Tongass National Forest, and we won’t stop now. During the Biden administration, your advocacy helped push for long-term protections of old-growth and mature trees — and now we need your advocacy again.   

Under the Trump administration, our fight to preserve clean water, safeguard public lands, and uphold environmental protections is more critical than ever.  We need your voice now to defend our forests from these attacks.   

A mountain lion walks in a forest at the base of a large, moss covered tree.
A mountain lion prowls along old-growth tree roots in the Siuslaw National Forest in western Oregon. (David Herasimtschuk)

Delivery to USDA, DOI

Important Notice

Your message is delivered to a public agency, and all information submitted may be placed in the public record. Do not submit confidential information.

By taking action, you will receive emails from Earthjustice. Change your mailing preferences or opt-out at any time. Learn more in our Privacy Policy. This Earthjustice action is hosted on EveryAction. Learn about EveryAction’s Privacy Policy.

Why is a phone number or prefix required on some action forms?

Trouble Viewing This Action?

If the action form is not loading above, please add earthjustice.org as a trusted website in your ad blocker or pause any ad blockers, and refresh this webpage. (Details.) If the action form still does not display, please report the problem to us at action@earthjustice.org. Thank you!

Your Actions Matter

Your messages make a difference, even if we have leaders who don't want to listen. Here's why.

You level the playing field.

Elected officials pay attention when they see that we are paying attention. Read more.

They may be hearing from industry lobbyists left and right, but hearing the stories of their constituents — that’s your power.

Our legislators serve at the pleasure of the people who gave them their job — you.

Make sure your elected officials know whose community and whose values they represent. When you contact your elected official, you’re putting a face and a name on an issue.

Whether or not you voted for them, they work for you, for the duration of their term.

Make sure your elected officials know whose community and whose values they represent. (Find your local, state, and federal elected officials.)

Your action is with us in court.

If a federal agency finalizes a harmful action, the record of public comments provides a basis for bringing them into court. Read more.

Throughout each of the public comment periods we alert you to, Earthjustice’s attorneys are researching and writing in-depth, technical comments to submit — detailing how the regulation could and should be stronger to protect the environment, our communities, and our planet.

We need you to join us — your specific experiences, knowledge, and voice are crucial to add to the Administrative Record through the comment periods.

Lawsuits we file that challenge weak or harmful federal regulations rely on what was submitted during the comment period. The court can only look at documents that are in the Administrative Record — including the public comments — to decide if the agency did something improper.

Your actions aid our litigation. Taking action and submitting comments during a comment period is substantively important.

It’s the law.

Federal agencies must pause what they’re doing and ask for — and consider — your comment. Read more.

Many of us may have never heard of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), but laws like these require our government to ask the public to weigh in before agencies adopt or change regulations.

Regulations essentially describe how federal agencies will carry out laws — including decisions that could undermine science, or weaken safeguards on public health.

Public comments are collected at various points throughout the federal government’s rulemaking process, including when a regulation is proposed and finalized. (Learn about the rulemaking process.) These comments become part of the official, legal public record — the “Administrative Record.”

When the public responds with a huge outpouring of support for environmental protections, these individual messages collectively undercut politicians' attempts to claim otherwise.

What this means is each of us can take a role in shaping the rules our government creates — and ensuring those rules are fair and effective.