The Biden administration may have gotten many things wrong in its tenure. However, this new move it’s making is one step in the right direction.
The Biden administration is enacting new rules to protect the oldest trees in the US. They are making it harder to cut them down for lumber.
The news has significant implications for climate change and the planet. Forests aid us by locking up carbon dioxide, helping reduce the impacts of climate change.
That’s in addition to providing habitat for wild animals, filtering drinking water sources, and offering powerful historical connections. The initiative was announced last Tuesday. It covers about 32 million acres of old growth and 80 million acres of mature forest nationally.
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Garett Rose, senior attorney at Natural Resources Defense Council, said in a statement.
“The administration has rightly recognized that protecting America’s mature and old-growth trees and forests must be a core part of America’s conservation vision and playbook to combat the climate crisis.”
The initiative also covers many more miniature forests on the East Coast. There, trees may be only a few hundred years old. Old-growth sequoias and bristlecone pines in the West can be over 2,000 years old.
Environmental activists have highlighted federally owned old and mature-growth forest areas proposed for logging. These include parts of the Green Mountain Forest in Vermont and the Evans Creek Project in Oregon. Officials plan to decertify almost 1,000 acres of spotted owl habitat there to permit logging.
The Biden initiative makes the approval process for logging old and mature forests harder. It also proposes creating plans to restore and protect those areas. Forests that benefit from the new order fall under the management of the U.S. Forest Service, separate from other initiatives to preserve similar forests overseen by the Bureau of Land Management.
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Logging is a big issue in the US, and it has existed since the European settlers first colonized parts of America. They found North America largely untouched by timber harvesting. They were only too eager to put them to good use, building cities and railroads, power industries, and floating a Navy.
In the late 1800s, federal officials managed the nation’s forests better to help protect water sources and provide timber harvests. The mission was later expanded to cover national forests from over-cutting.
More than half of the nation’s forests are under private ownership. But they’re also among the youngest, unlike the federally preserved old-growth and mature forests.
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Logging once provided jobs, boosting economies, but environmental restrictions have changed. Old-growth timber is very useful because it can take less work to harvest and turn into large boards.
These boards are more valuable because they can be larger and more robust. Sierra Club forests campaign manager Alex Craven calls America’s ancient forests some of the nation’s most potent defense against the climate crisis.
Like many other citizens, Craven is happy to see that the Biden administration continues to support forest conservation. Hopefully, it isn’t too late.
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