In the Appalachian foothills outside Athens, Ohio, more than 20,000 acres of forest land was mined for coal in the early 20th century, destroying miles upon miles of pristine woodlands.
By the 1930s, the federal government had to step in, taking it out of private hands and establishing the Wayne national forest in an attempt to prevent further degradation. In the decades since, maple, oak and other hardwood trees have taken over, returning to nature a region previously better known for extraction.
Home to important waterways, the eastern hellbender salamander – an amphibian proposed for listing as an endangered species – hundreds of miles of trails and a host of other outdoor recreational activities, the Wayne national forest draws a quarter million visitors every year.
“People use the national forest for fishing, hunting, whether they’re trail runners or cyclists or ATV or horseback riders [and] for camping,” says Molly Jo Stanley of the Ohio Environmental Council who lives several miles from its borders.
All the while, underneath the forest floor, gob piles – a layer of coal waste material about a foot deep – is kept in place by the roots of millions of trees and plants.
But now, with the Trump administration targeting 100m acres of forest across the country for logging, this critical wilderness area – Ohio’s sole national forest – could be wiped out.
A man rides his ATV along a trail that runs through the Wayne national forest near Ironton, Ohio, in 2004. Photograph: Howie Mccormick/AP
Trump’s executive order was followed by a memo in April from the secretary for agriculture, Brooke Rollins, that established an “emergency declaration situation” that specifically identified the Wayne national forest as a site for lumber production. The memo also outlined the government’s intention to remove protections previously established by the National Environmental Policy Act.
The US Forest Service manages almost 300,000 sq miles of 154 national forests around the country, of which about one-fourth is suitable for timber management. Tracts of trees are regularly sold to private and other lumber companies often following a bidding process. Staff shortages and a lack of interest from lumber buyers in recent years have resulted in the Forest Service missing its sales targets by around 10% on average over the past decade.
But more than 80% of the Wayne national forest is classified as suitable for logging, drawing concern from locals.
“This executive order is a sweeping set of rules that does not address the nuances of the forests across the country. [It] stated that it was to prevent forest fires. In Ohio, clear-cutting forests is not the way to prevent forest fires,” says Stanley.
“While timbering is not inherently a bad thing, large-scale timbering has a lot of impact on our ecosystems. The roads that have to be built to access the timber cost the taxpayer more money than the revenue generated from these timbering projects.”
Unlike the huge forests and wilderness areas of the American west, federal forests where the public can forage and enjoy nature are relatively uncommon in the industrial Midwest.
On top of that, the large-scale removal of trees could fuel major leaching of pollutants that have remained in the soil from the mining days but which, without live tree roots keeping it in place, could flow into waterways, poisoning drinking water for local communities.
Tens of millions of people depend on drinking water that originates upstream in national forests, say observers. The Ohio River, which has a greater discharge rate than the Colombia and Yukon Rivers, is just miles from one unit of the Wayne national forest.
Other major threats resulting from clearcutting logging are increased fire risks and landslides, say experts.
“Over and over, we’ve seen in Appalachia and across the country when you log areas, you potentially increase the danger of wildfires because you increase the roads that lead to 90% of wildfires [that occur] within a half-mile. Opening up big areas allows for more wind, leaves behind a lot of slash and tinder – logging companies only take the big trees,” says Will Harlan, a senior scientist at the Center of Biological Diversity, who has experienced firsthand the destruction of forests around Asheville, North Carolina, from last year’s devastating Hurricane Helene.
“We saw here that the landslides after Hurricane Helene in the Pisgah and Nantahala national forests, many of those occurred where there were logging projects and logging roads.”
Building and maintaining roads and culverts in forests has cost taxpayers billions of dollars over the decades.
But advocates of harvesting lumber on public lands say it brings significant economic benefits to rural areas of the country that often find themselves with few other resources or opportunities for employment. In 2020, the Forest Service sold $183m worth of lumber from national forests, fueling tens of thousands of direct and indirect jobs.
The most recent sale of Wayne national forest lumber was for over 300,000 cubic feet of hardwood and eastern white pine that took place in August. Logging in Ohio is worth over $1.1bn a year, with much of that concentrated in seven southeastern counties including Athens county.
Questions sent by the Guardian to the US Forest Service and the Ohio forestry association querying whether logging could imperil drinking water sources for residents were not responded to.
In Athens county, where the poverty rate is 11% above the national level and which ranks as the only county in Ohio facing persistent poverty over a period of decades, access to jobs is among the lowest in the state.
In August, the closure of a paper mill that used low-grade locally sourced hardwood lumber and employed 800 people in Chillicothe, a town of 22,000 people two counties west of Athens, has sent the region into a tailspin. The mill had provided a ready processing site for local lumber since it was founded in 1847.
All the while, conservationists question the need to log areas such as national forests especially as the US exported $3.5bn worth of lumber in 2021.
“Ninety-eight per cent of forests in Ohio are privately-owned. Do we really need to be logging in the 2% that belongs to everyone?” asks Harlan.
At the same time, Appalachia is set to be among the hardest-hit regions from long-term climate change due to topographical, funding and other challenges.
“In Appalachia, we’ve been seeing historic flooding events,” says Stanley.
“Without these intact forests, large-scale logging will absolutely impact and increase the potential for major flooding events. Intact forests are the best control that we have against that.”
