Joan Maloof is the founder and co-executive director of the Old-Growth Forest Network, a 10-year-old national nonprofit that has identified and protected 165 old-growth forests across the U.S.
On Earth Day, President Biden signed an executive order declaring the nation’s oldest and largest trees worthy of federal protection. His order directed the creation of a national inventory of mature and old-growth forests on federal land, recognizing they are an essential climate solution. The results of this survey are due by Earth Day 2023.
Yet the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management — the very agencies charged with conducting the inventory — continue contracting with a timber industry that hires loggers to cut these invaluable trees. Bigger trees bring bigger profits. These two agencies manage roughly 250 million acres of land. According to a new report by the Climate-Forests Coalition, a group of more than 100 environmental nonprofits of which my organization is a member, ongoing logging projects threaten 240,000 acres of mature and old-growth trees on federal land: These trees are at risk despite Biden’s exec... Read more