Opinion: The opinions expressed here are solely those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the Sierra Club.

I retired in 2002 as deputy chief of the US Forest Service with 35 years of experience, and I was stunned, happily, when President Biden unveiled Executive Order 14072 during his second year in office. On this Earth Day, the future of mature and old-growth forests looked bright. Among the EO’s numerous measures, one stood out to me: “Conserve America’s mature and old-growth forests on federal lands.” I’ve worked with dozens of environmental groups to see how the Forest Service would address this opportunity.

After reading the EO, though, an immediate question arose: “Will the White House tell the Forest Service how to implement it or ask them?” My experience told me that unless the administration’s environmental overseers kept the Forest Service on a very tight leash, the agency would likely do as little as possible for as long as possible.

My question arises because when it comes to protecting wilderness, wild and scenic rivers, roadless areas, and old-growth forests, the US Forest Service has proved a begrudging landlord, preferring logging to prioritizing our forest’s natural values.

An eager Forest Service plunged into a timber production era following WWII, eliminating millions of acres of mature and old-growth (MOG) forests. The agency still measures performance by the amount of timber harvest while failing to develop more holistic measures for other healthy forest attributes. This “timber first and always” mindset persists in agency culture.

The EO directs the Forest Service to restore and conserve MOG, but why has the agency refused to embrace the opportunity? When confronting threats of climate change, why does the agency do so little to protect MOG, which store immense amounts of carbon, in favor of continued logging?

Throughout my career, I watched a resistant Forest Service cling to its timber bias and low-ball wilderness recommendations to Congress. The 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Regulation (which stopped logging and road building on 60 million acres) encountered entrenched opposition within the agency.

The Biden administration has mistakenly allowed the Forest Service to set the tone. The EO failed to even list logging as a primary threat to MOG, though the Forest Service has logged millions of acres and continues to do so now. Further, the agency offered no interim policies to restore and conserve MOG pending policy formulation.

Interim measures seemed imperative. The Forest Service should have: 1) immediately issued a press release supporting the aims of the EO and making restoring and conserving MOG an agency priority; 2) reviewed all active and planned logging projects to assess their impacts on MOG; 3) suspended all such MOG logging until after a policy was formalized; and 4) managed procedural steps, especially those that could be accomplished simultaneously, to complete the job expertly and swiftly.

The Forest Service has done none of these things. Had the EO surprised them and left them scrambling to respond? Nothing could be further from the truth.

A black bear traverses a downed log in a verdant old-growth forest, illustrating its many nonmonetary values. | Photo by David Herasimtschuk

Much like the genesis of the 2001 proposal to protect roadless areas, environmentalists met early on with Biden officials to pitch the idea of an EO protecting MOG. The Council on Environmental Quality proceeded—with the involvement of the Forest Service—but environmentalists had no further say in the document. Thus, we saw no mention of logging as a threat. However, the EO did require a nationwide MOG inventory and definitions of terms, which assured a slow, plodding process.

Forest Service bureaucrats know their business quite well. They can (and do) manipulate political appointees to achieve policies they like. A few word changes here, a couple of clever omissions there, adding steps to slow the process, and what appear to be innocuous edits can profoundly affect policy. I see agency fingerprints in the text of the EO, allowing the agency to comply with the letter of the EO while blunting its original lofty spirit.

For example, I believe the decision to omit the threat posed by logging to be intentional. Facing hard blowback, the agency addressed this deficiency in its threat assessment, but in a way that minimized the impact of the millions of acres of MOG forests logged by the Forest Service, thus vastly reducing MOG forests that remain today.       

While the FS determines the fate of MOG, it acts aggressively to deal with forest fires—and there is a close relationship between MOG and fire. The Forest Service sees fire as a major threat, as it should. The Forest Service can, and must, address reducing fire risk while simultaneously doing all it can to restore and conserve MOG. The agency apparently thinks the two aims are mutually exclusive and has chosen to address fire at the expense of rare MOG forests.    

Reducing fire risk has cost billions without putting much of a dent in the liabilities. Furthermore, fire does not destroy forests but changes them. Within a fire perimeter, severely burned areas (that kill almost all trees) usually consume only about 15 percent.

Further, when trees are killed, they hold onto almost all on-site carbon, typically more than 90 percent, and dead trees serve vital diversity functions until they finally revert to soil. Moderate fire, and especially lightly burned areas, often restore and improve forest health and diversity.

We’ve reached a sad juncture: What started with an EO explicitly directing the Forest Service to restore and conserve MOG has ended with yet more logging. The Forest Service holds to its old ways. How tragic, given the importance of MOG forests to a more robust and diverse future for our national forests, as well as MOG’s outsized contribution to carbon sequestration and storage role in a changing climate.

Where do we stand, knowing the Trump team will surely kill any policy aimed at protecting MOG forests?

I suggest the Forest Service suspend action and allow its policy to remain, unfinished, for now. Do not give Trump or this Congress an opportunity to kill it. Instead, save it for a future administration that can be trusted to manage our federal forests—especially our old growth—responsibly. Further, my counsel to all forest supervisors and district rangers: although a formal policy may not exist, dare to embrace the spirit of the EO by sparing MOG from the saw. In MOG forests under your authority, restore and conserve mature and old-growth forests, as originally envisioned by the EO. The arc of history is on your side.