Activists are increasingly frustrated with President Joe Biden’s unwillingness to exert pressure on the US Forest Service to slow or stop the logging of old-growth forests, HuffPost reported on Thursday.
On Earth Day last year, Mr Biden signed an executive order aimed at protecting and restoring old-growth forests — ordering the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service to inventory all the old-growth and mature forests on federal land and design policy and “institutionalise climate-smart management and conservation strategies.”
In the executive order, Mr Biden clearly laid out the environmental and spiritual importance of preserving the country’s mature and old-growth forests.
“Strengthening America’s forests, which are home to cherished expanses of mature and old-growth forests on Federal lands, is critical to the health, prosperity, and resilience of our communities — particularly in light of the threat of catastrophic wildfires,” Mr Biden wrote. “Forests provide clean air and water, sustain the plant and animal life fundamental to combating the global climate and biodiversity crises, and hold special importance to Tribal Nations.”
But according to a number of environmental organisations, progress on the objectives laid out in the executive order has been unacceptably slow — especially considering the extent of the climate crisis.
According to HuffPost, the Forest Service is a particular issue. The agency was created more than a century ago in large part to ensure that the country met its timber production targets, but now, in the current moment, environmentalists believe the agency should be serving an entirely different purpose.
Thus far, despite the executive order, it’s reportedly been unwilling to change — and the Biden administration has been unwilling to push it.
“We are trying desperately to make sure the White House stays involved,” Steve Pedery of Oregon Wild told HuffPost. “I think if this gets delegated down in a time where it’s perfectly reasonable the administration has its focus on a lot of other things, we’ll see the Forest Service either run out the clock on it or come up with something that says, ‘Logging is the answer. What was the question?’”
If logging remains the Forest Service’s primary aim, the consequences for the few old-growth forests that remain intact in the US could be devastating in the long term.
HuffPost reported that the inventory of old-growth and mature forests performed in accordance with the Biden executive order found that there are only 32.7 million acres of old-growth forest and 80.1 million acres of mature forest in the country. Before Europeans arrived to colonise what is now the United States, there were a billion acres of forest on the land.
