Forests in the Appalachian Mountains may soon see more logging.
President Donald Trump signed two executive orders this spring to expand domestic logging and nullify environmental protections on more than half of the nation’s national forests, including some old-growth woods. While the West will see the most extensive impacts, the Appalachians represent the biggest affected area in the East.
In Tennessee, more than 500,000 acres could be at risk. The state’s sole national forest, the Cherokee, is among the areas determined to have an “emergency situation” by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which issued a memo shortly after Trump passed the orders. The agency claimed that increased logging will improve the “resiliency” of forests against wildfires.
“Executive orders such as these are really just the latest in a longtime pattern of attempts to expand logging on federal lands while reducing public transparency,” said Davis Mounger, the co-director of Tennessee Heartwood, a conservation group focused on the state’s forested lands.
Climate “resiliency” in forests is often poorly understood, especially in the Southeast, according to Mounger, who said the word is “a legitimate ecological term that is sometimes abused to justify logging.”
The Appalachian region contains diverse forest ecosystems with varying levels of fire associations. Mounger said it is not appropriate to apply Western models of logging for fire suppression — an idea promoted by the timber industry that lacks scientific evidence. Also, fire management has been applied to southern forests like the Cherokee for decades — forest managers burn about 20,000 acres in Cherokee each year.
How the Cherokee will be impacted
The Cherokee National Forest is the largest piece of public land in Tennessee. It covers more than 660,000 acres in the Appalachian Mountains. The forest is divided, at least in terms of designation, by the state’s half of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The forest also connects to other national forests in Virginia, North Carolina and Georgia.
This southern portion of the Appalachian Mountains has historically been relatively protected, partially due to accessibility challenges.
“As far as the eastern United States, they tend to be the areas that have the highest numbers of acres of roadless and other wild, contiguous forest areas,” Mounger said. “So, it’s no surprise that these areas are coming into the crosshairs of the Trump administration.”
Courtesy U.S. Forest Service The U.S. Forest Service burns about 20,000 acres of woods in Cherokee National Forest each year as part of its fire management practices.
Tennessee’s national forest is facing multiple threats simultaneously, between Trump’s orders and agency directives. Expanded logging and new roads could fragment woods, which in turn can increase wildfire risks, release carbon dioxide stored in trees, damage rivers through soil erosion, destroy habitat and increase the spread of animal diseases into human populations. In other words, scientists say that new logging would make forests less resilient to climate change while causing planet-warming emissions.
Logging was already happening in the forest: Cherokee produces about 1.3 to 1.5 million cubic feet of timber each year, according to a U.S. Department of Agriculture spokesperson.
But the public forest now faces risks of expedited logging without public input, and some previously protected areas could now see clearcutting. Last week, USDA announced plans to retract the federal “roadless rule,” a policy from 2001 that protected nearly 60 million acres of national forest lands from logging.
The Cherokee National Forest contains 65,000 acres of forest protected by this rule. About 20,000 acres with former “roadless” determinations in Cherokee, reflected in a map below, were upgraded to a higher protection status called “wilderness” when Congress passed the Tennessee Wilderness Act in 2018. Tennessee had already designated about 66,000 acres in Cherokee as wilderness in the 1980s, so the state now has a total of nearly 86,000 acres of forests protected by law — while everything else is vulnerable.
Trees across as much as 570,000 acres of forested land in Cherokee could be put up for sale, between the executive orders and the possible roadless rule deletion.
Courtesy U.S. Forest Service About 20,000 acres previously protected under the “roadless rule” were protected by Congress with “wilderness” designations in 2018.
In addition to Cherokee, Tennessee contains about 60,000 acres of forested land in the Land Between the Lakes National Recreational Area, which is managed by the U.S. Forest Service. It is not covered by the roadless rule, and it is not included in USDA’s map of the “emergency” forest lands. These public lands could, however, still be impacted by the broader orders for increased logging and reduced environmental protections.
Public accountability is also at stake. The Trump administration’s plans to disrupt normal environmental review processes means the public may lose opportunities for oversight or input. Environmental groups are expected to challenge the administration if it rescinds the roadless rule or rolls back certain environmental safeguards.
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