Trump’s War on American Nature

The Trump administration’s attacks on clean energy are the most prominent part of his hatred of environmentalism. Given that nostalgia is the core of Trumpism and that his version of nostalgia is the 1950s (of course), going back to the energy policies of the 50s really means a lot to the man. But so does going back to the era where corporations could absolutely devastate other natural resources without consequence. That’s why he and his cronies (most of whom are more defined by sheer greed than nostalgia) gutted the EPA, repealed the Chevron Doctrine (thanks John Roberts!), and eliminated the administrative state as much as they could.

So as I sit here in Oregon visiting my father, I hear that he is going to open up the last remnants of old growth Oregon forests for the saw too, assuming saws still exist that can actually process these logs.

There’s a kind of forest in western Oregon that you feel before you understand. The canopy closes overhead and the light changes. The air goes cool and wet and still. Old-growth douglas fir and western red cedar rise two hundred feet, draped in moss so thick the trunks disappear beneath it. The forest floor is fern and lichen and fallen giants slowly becoming soil. You can stand in these places and feel, viscerally, that you’re inside something alive. Something that was functioning long before anyone thought to measure it and will outlast whatever we decide to do with it.

If we let it.

On February 19th, the BLM published a Notice of Intent to gut the management plans governing nearly 2.5 million acres of these forests across 18 counties. The proposal seeks to eliminate old-growth and wildlife protections to facilitate what the agency calls “maximum” logging capacity. The stated goal is to accelerate timber harvest to approximately one billion board feet per year. That’s four times current levels. It would match the peak production of the 1960s, before the Endangered Species Act existed, before anyone with authority cared whether a spotted owl or a salmon run survived the next decade.

The existing management plans were finalized in 2016. They took four years to develop. They balanced timber production with habitat protection, water quality, recreation, and the survival of species that federal law requires us to protect.

The administration wants to tear them up. And they’ve given you 30 days to say something about it.

There will be no public meetings.

The agency charged with managing one in every ten acres of land in the United States wants to fundamentally reshape how some of the most ecologically significant forests in the world are managed. And they don’t intend to look a single person in the eye while they do it.

These are some of the last remaining low-elevation old-growth forests in Oregon. They store more carbon per acre than any terrestrial ecosystem on the planet. They filter drinking water for downstream communities. They hold soil on steep slopes above salmon streams that are already in crisis. They’re home to the northern spotted owl, the marbled murrelet, coho salmon, steelhead, and hundreds of species that evolved over millennia in conditions you can’t replicate by planting seedlings in rows.

The places directly threatened by this proposal have names. The Valley of the Giants. The Sandy River corridor. The North Fork Clackamas. Mary’s Peak. Crabtree Valley. Alsea Falls. The Upper Molalla River. These aren’t abstractions on a planning map. They’re places people hike, fish, paddle, and come back to year after year. They’re places that remind us we belong to something older than ourselves, that we’re capable, as a country, of deciding some things are worth more standing than cut down.

Now the Trump Administration wants to open them all up for destruction.

That the hippies who like to hike and fish and canoe will suffer just makes it all the better.

Thirty years ago, Oregonians–or at least the ones who care about these issues, which was a lot–would have been on the streets, up in arms. This was the period of the battles over the protection of the northern spotted owl, which saved most of these last remnant forests since those owls need them to survive. There were a whole variety of protest movements that ranged from litigation to bombings. And despite the stupidity of the people engaging in the latter, most of them worked and the environmentalists won these battles. I wonder if there is any energy to repeat any of it in 2026. I kind of doubt it, though we will see if the logs are cut.