Southern Environmental Law Center — This week, SELC filed a new, first-of-its-kind lawsuit that alleges the Forest Service’s ‘timber target’ decisions put the climate at risk, undermine the Biden administration’s important climate goals, and violate federal law.
The case, which was filed on behalf of the Chattooga Conservancy, MountainTrue, and an individual in Missouri, centers around the Forest Service’s failure to properly study the massive environmental and climate impacts of its timber targets and the logging projects it designs to fulfill them.
Each year, the Forest Service and Department of Agriculture set timber targets, which the Forest Service is required to meet through logging on public lands across the country. In recent years, the national target has been set as high as 4 billion board feet – or enough lumber to circle the globe more than 30 times. The Forest Service itself has said that the amount of timber sold from our national forests in recent years has been “higher than any period in the previous few decades.”
Even more concerning, the Forest Service recently announced plans to increase the already high targets in the coming years, particularly in the South and East.