A decade in the making, the future of the forest plan to manage Western North Carolina’s national forests is now hazy, threatened by a lawsuit, a presidential executive order accelerating timber production and the scars of Tropical Storm Helene, which leveled thousands of acres of forest.
Finalized in 2023 the forest plan sets out a strategy to restore the integrity of forests, ecosystems and watersheds within Pisgah and Nantahala national forests. However, the the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) executes specific actions on the project level. The agency analyzes and carries out each project it proposes, including logging projects, within the framework of the forest plan.
The focus and scale of timber projects, however, are in flux. A new lawsuit filed by the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) challenges the plan at the same time that a federal directive may force the Forest Service to accelerate logging across national forests, deepening concerns over environmental harm.
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The lawsuit filed on March 28 by the SELC on behalf of four environmental organizations alleges that Tropical Storm Helene exposed critical flaws in the Nantahala-Pisgah Forest Plan, which underestimates climate-driven storm impacts and promotes high levels of timber harvesting.
“Our national forests are reeling from massive storm destruction, yet they’re still subject to a management plan that includes unrealistic timber targets,” said David Reid of the Sierra Club’s North Carolina chapter, one of the litigants.
“Failing to change the plan would create additional threats to the natural beauty treasured by millions of visitors,” he said.
The suit is the third connected to one of the two WNC national forests that the Virginia-based nonprofit legal organization has filed since early 2024.
In February 2024, the SELC opposed a 15-acre timber sale in Nantahala National Forest. The Forest Service announced it would not harvest the trees last June.
And in April 2024, the SELC sued the Forest Service again, arguing that the forest plan aims to significantly increase timber production, threatening sensitive areas and endangered bats. The ongoing legal action alleged the forest plan’s analysis was flawed and violated the Endangered Species Act by failing to study the plan’s impact on federally protected bats, endangering their survival and causing broader ecological consequences.
“We’ve given the agency every possible opportunity to do the right thing and fix the plan, but the Forest Service has refused,” said attorney Sam Evans of the SELC. Evans estimated that “somewhere between 10% and 20% of the forest has some meaningful level of damage” due to Helene. That amounts to 100,000 to 200,000 acres of impacted forest.
“We simply can’t stand by and ignore the significant and long-lasting harm this plan will do to these remarkable forests and the communities that rely on them,” he said.
The Forest Service did not comment on litigation regarding the Nantahala and Pisgah Forest Plan. By law, the agency has 60 days to respond to the allegations in the complaint.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration is pressuring the Forest Service to go in the opposite direction, logging more trees on millions of acres of national forest throughout the western and southeastern U.S. On April 3, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins released an emergency order memo to address “declining forest health.”
The directive aims to boost timber production by streamlining processes, enhancing efficiency and consistency, and proposing legislative changes to support sustainable forest management. The memo said the changes will streamline Forest Service ‘s project planning, decision-making and implementation. The memo also instructs National Forest units to limit the number of project alternatives presented in an environmental assessment, potentially limiting or overlooking more environmentally sound alternatives.
The directive seeks to increase timber production by 25%, which represents a tall order for an agency that recently experienced staffing cuts, Evans said.
“You don’t (increase timber production) by that level by being careful and making sure that you’re not harming rare species, closing important recreational areas or protecting scenery,” Evans said. “You do it by taking procedural shortcuts to put logs on trucks with the bare minimum of resources.”
The SELC is currently examining the presidential directive and considering its response.
This article first appeared on Carolina Public Press and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
you knew this was coming… they’re looking to wholesale log the our national forests, both in the east and out west, including the Tongrass in Alaska. Here in the Pisgah and Nantahala National Forests they’re looking to log mature oak forest tracts… that’s where the valuable timber is. It will be nothing short of completely devastating to our WNC national forests, which have the largest tracts of mature oak forest, and old growth forest tracts on the east coast ..in the United States for that matter. This “Emergency Situation Determination” is another so called Executive Order/ Emergency Directive coming from the Trump administration in order to circumvent existing statutes …in the case of our national forests these are environmental, wildlife, and water protection laws. They’re using the forest damage from Helene, and the recent relatively small forest fires in WNC to justify these exponentially increased levels of logging. The fact is that removing large fire-resistant trees gives way to younger forests that are much more susceptible to fire. In other words, you can’t log your way out of fire danger…. quite the opposite actually… the more logging, the more fire susceptible the remaining younger forest becomes. If you go into the areas recently burned in the slew of fires we had earlier this month in WNC it’s very clear.. the ground cover/ litter is burned off but 95% plus of the mature hardwood trees are unharmed and perfectly fine. Also, the trees that were felled by Helene -mostly mature oaks- did not burn. They’re still green and cannot/ will not burn ..and by the time they do dry out they will be too decomposed to burn.
Once our higher elevation mature oak forest are cut.. they are gone forever as a practical matter. Also gone with them is the watershed protection they provide along with the increasingly scarce biodiversity they harbor. This madness emanating from the Oval Office needs to be vigorously challenged in our federal courts, and groups like the Southern Environmental Law Center and the Sierra Club -and our own homegrown Mountain True- need to be supported in their much needed efforts in regard to the protection of our remaining invaluable and irreplaceable mature hardwood forests that we are so blessed to live with here in western North Carolina.