Logging & Timber Harvest

The Roadless Rule's most immediate practical effect has never been philosophical. It has been financial.

No timber company hauls logs out of a roadless forest. Without a road, there is no haul route. Without a haul route, there is no commercial timber sale. The rule does not prohibit logging because it objects to trees being cut. It prohibits roads — and in doing so, it makes commercial logging in these areas economically impossible.

Rescind the rule, and the economics change. Roads become permissible. Timber sales become viable. The sequence that has played out across millions of acres of previously wild national forest — road, then logging, then the compounding consequences of both — becomes available to apply to what remains.

Old forests are not simply large trees. They are structures. A forest that has never been commercially logged has standing dead trees — snags — riddled with cavities that Pileated Woodpeckers excavate and that dozens of other species subsequently inhabit. It has coarse woody debris on the floor — fallen logs in various states of decay, each stage a distinct habitat for different fungi, invertebrates, salamanders, and mosses. It has multi-layered canopy with gaps of different sizes and ages, each supporting different communities of plants and animals. Commercial logging removes not just the timber but the structure — and structure, once removed, takes a century or more to return.

The official definition of code 5.3 Logging, Harvesting & Controlling Trees encompasses "harvesting trees and other woody vegetation for timber, fiber, or fuel, including site preparation and other forestry management practices." Its exposition distinguishes timber operations in natural forests from plantations — the species in this database are threatened by the former.

In the roadless areas covered by this application: 256 species carry documented logging-related threats — including 19 critically imperiled and 46 imperiled species. For these organisms, the old-growth structural features that logging removes are not aesthetic preferences. They are the habitat those species require to survive.