April 2025

The Issues: Sounds Good On Paper

Article by Rich Donnell, Editor-in-Chief, Timber Processing

President Trump’s recent executive order to the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management to facilitate their procedures in order to streamline and enhance timber sales on federal forests caused me a hint of déjà vu.

When Bill Clinton was running for president in 1992 he said he would get timber sales going again in the Northwest U.S. A couple of years earlier, the northern spotted owl was listed as a threatened species, and ensuing lawsuits over federal timber sales in the Pacific Northwest led to a 1991 injunction issued by a federal district judge that shut down the federal timber sale program on nine national forests.

After winning the election, President Clinton convened a Forest Conference, as it was called, in Portland, Ore. on April 2, 1993. The one-day roundtable discussion included Clinton, Vice President Gore, other members of the Cabinet, and numerous citizen representatives from timber, environmental and local government interests.

I remember it well, because I was there, press pass and all, along with hundreds of other national and regional media representatives. The Forest Conference was held only a few days after the Wood Technology machinery show at the relatively new Oregon Convention Center. We always exhibited our magazines at the Wood Technology show, so I figured why not stay on a few days for the conference.

It was pretty impressive as it happened, and for one brief shining moment the timber industry thought the new administration might put some sense, not to mention actual timber, back into the federal timber sales program. (I think we knew better.)

Unfortunately, what came out of the Forest Conference was more of a whimper than a bang. The Northwest Forest Plan, as it was called, which was revealed in 1994, proposed a meager annual timber harvest of 1.2 billion BF on those Northwest federal forests. Pretty small potatoes. And due to continuing timber sale lawsuits and chaos, only a little more than half of that amount was actually harvested annually during the next 10 years.

President Trump’s recent executive order for the “Immediate Expansion of American Timber Production” certainly has great intentions. But the fear is that it will continue to wither away through the ranks of the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management, and whatever comes out on the other side will still be running into lawsuits and dead-ends. But maybe that’s just my pessimistic side coming out, having been around this for so long and having seen the catastrophic demise of the Northwest timber sales program.

Maybe President Trump should have his own Forest Conference. Being that our company now produces the Timber Processing & Energy Expo (the successor to the old Wood Technology show), we can open up an entire hall or two at the Portland Expo Center. Our next show is September 23-25, 2026, which gives the President’s team plenty of time to pull it together. It doesn’t hurt to ask.