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forests
The Forests I Love Are Threatened—But Here’s Why I Still Have Hope
Working together, we can continue to advance a better, more sustainable vision for the South.
May 06, 2025
May is one of my favorite months to go walking through the forests near my home in Cedar Mountain, North Carolina. Up here, near the mountainous border between the Carolinas, the air smells sweet and clean this time of the year, filtered by the bounty of trees. I’ve gotten to know some of them like neighbors: the cucumber magnolias, maples, sourwoods, and, of course, dogwoods.
I am a lifelong lover of forests. I am also the executive director of the Dogwood Alliance, an environmental organization dedicated to preserving Southeastern forests. As such, I make sure to pay attention to the forests and the trees.
Lately, when I visit the forests, I see scars. I see the smoldering scars of the recent fires that sent my husband and me into a panicked evacuation. Or, I see the giant holes where trees used to be before Hurricane Helene, which devastated the area and kept me stranded in New York City for days unable to get in touch with my husband or my daughter. Ironically, I was at the annual gathering known as Climate Week as everyone learned that the Asheville area is not a climate haven. Nowhere really is. My neck of the woods is beautiful, but not invincible.
We’re not only fighting what’s bad but also working toward what’s good.
Still, when it comes to climate change, our forests are our best friends and biggest protectors. They can block the wind and absorb the water before it inundates communities. They’re also among the oldest and best tools in the toolbox when it comes to climate change because nothing—and I mean nothing—stores carbon like a good, old-fashioned tree.
And as destructive as the hurricane and the fires were, the biggest threat to our forests remains the logging industry. The rate of logging in our Southern U.S. forests is four times higher than that of the South American rainforests. Despite claims to the contrary, the logging industry is the biggest tree-killer in the nation.
The wood-pellet biomass industry is a major culprit. Over the last 10 years, our region has become the largest wood-pellet exporter in the entire world. Companies receive massive subsidies to chop our forests into wood pellets that are then shipped overseas to be burned for electricity. This process is a major waste of taxpayer dollars and produces more carbon emissions than coal.
And it seems that regardless of who is in charge at the state or federal level, they consistently fail to protect forests. Most recently, President Donald Trump signed executive orders that threaten to turbocharge logging and wood production while subverting cornerstone legal protections such as the Endangered Species Act and the National Environmental Policy Act. The truth is that policies that increase logging and wood production will only make communities like mine even more vulnerable to climate impacts, while decreasing the likelihood of recovery. The Trump administration's efforts to ramp up logging and close environmental justice offices are especially troublesome given the disproportionate impact that the forestry industry has on disadvantaged communities.
It can be an alarming picture to look at, especially when I think about the communities that will be harmed the most: low-income communities of color. But, I’m not new to this movement. I’ve seen again and again, those same communities rise up and fight off some of the biggest multinational corporations on the planet and hold our elected officials’ feet to the fire.
We’ve successfully clawed back subsidies for the biomass industry, slowing the growth of wood-pellet plants, and sounded the alarm when these facilities violated important pollution limits. They’ve had to pay millions of dollars in fines, shut down plants, and scrap plans for expansion. This is what gives me hope for the people and forests of the South.
We’re not only fighting what’s bad but also working toward what’s good.
Just last month, Dogwood Alliance’s community partners in Gloster, Mississippi scored a major victory. The community exerted huge pressure on the state’s Department of Environmental Quality to deny a permit to expand wood-pellet production for Drax—one of the most powerful multinational biomass corporations—and won! This means that the town’s residents will not have to face increased air pollution, noise pollution, traffic, and the greater mutilation of their bucolic landscape. If Gloster, a town of less than 1,000 people, can beat a megacorporation, I know we can stand up to the Trump administration and continue to advance a better, more sustainable vision for the South.
Through my work, I have the absolute privilege of partnering with some of the most inspiring leaders in the environmental justice movement. For example, we are partnering with Reverend Leo Woodberry, a pastor in South Carolina, to create a community forest on the land where his ancestors were once enslaved. With the support of community-focused donors, soon the Britton’s Neck Community Conservation Forest will be full of hiking trails, camp sites, and an ecolodge for locals and tourists from around the world to enjoy. This rise in outdoor recreation and (literal) foot traffic will create a badly needed economic rejuvenation for the local community, thus turning standing trees into gold. After all, outdoor recreation creates five times more jobs than the forestry industry.
This is not an isolated story. Four years ago this month, the Pee Dee Indian Tribe cut the ribbon on their educational center and 100-acre community forest in McColl, South Carolina as part of their effort to create a regenerative economy that prioritizes ecological harmony. All across the South, people are protecting the forests that protect them through a new community-led Justice Conservation initiative, which prioritizes forest protection in the communities on the front lines of our nation's most heavily logged areas.
The other day, when I went for my walk, I noticed that the scars are starting to give way to shoots of new growth. This is the time of year when the trees come alive, lighting the forest with purple and pink and white blossoms. That, to me, is hope. That, to me, is a miracle.
Right now, it feels like the whole world is on edge, bracing for the next major weather event. I know how helpless it can feel to watch the communities you love experience severe damage, I’ve lived it. But we are our own best hope. Just like the trees in a forest, we’re stronger together. Whether you live here in the South or across the country, I invite you to join us in protecting our forests and supporting the types of projects we’re spearheading through the Justice Conservation initiative.
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As Broadway's Redwood Soars, Real Forest Canopies Are Vanishing
Broadway's spotlight on redwoods helps us understand why what happens above our heads matters so much for our future below.
Apr 22, 2025
A woman flees devastating personal loss and finds herself at the base of towering redwood trees in Northern California. There, she persuades two botanists to let her climb hundreds of feet above the forest floor into a hidden world that transforms her perspective—and her life. This isn't the latest adventure film or bestselling memoir. It's Redwood, Broadway's unlikely hit musical that's bringing attention to one of nature's most overlooked but critical ecosystems.
Many of us working in forest conservation and restoration management were delighted when it opened on Broadway. When a musical drives sold-out audiences to stand and cheer for characters climbing into a forest canopy, it creates a cultural moment that conservation science alone never could—bringing vital attention to something that most Americans never think to look up and notice.
As a child in the 1960s, I wandered among ancient redwoods, craning my neck upward in wonder, while my parents worked to establish Redwood National Park. My father, Edgar, who would later receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his conservation work, and my mother, Peggy, who wrote about redwoods and the need to protect them and lobbying President John F. Kennedy's administration to do so, taught me that what made these giants special wasn't just their massive trunks but the entire living forest system from roots to crown. Those early lessons helped shape my life's work because what happens hundreds of feet above the forest floor matters more than most realize.
The more people recognize the vital role and wonder of forest canopies, the more momentum we build for their restoration and protection.
These aerial systems represent nature's overlooked masterpiece—a complex world scientists call the "eighth continent." Redwood canopies host biodiversity found nowhere else. Leather-leaf ferns create massive mats—up to the size of cars—that can store 5,000 gallons of water per acre, keeping forests cool and moist during summer droughts. The dense foliage also captures fog moisture that sustains the entire forest below while creating microclimates that buffer against climate extremes.
Canopies contribute to the entire forest system, linking the top to the bottom of the forest. Dust captured in the abundant foliage of ferns and huckleberry plants combined with accumulated organic matter forms rich "aerial soil" that becomes the foundation for entire sky-high communities. Rare lichens, wandering salamanders, and small mammals thrive in this elevated habitat, maintaining delicate ecological balances. From these heights, the benefits cascade downward: Canopy cover shades streams, cooling water for salmon and other temperature-sensitive aquatic species, integrating the entire forest system from treetop to riverbed into a single, interconnected climate buffer.
Yet this hidden world faces a crisis. Only 5% of old-growth redwood forests remain and have intact canopy ecosystems. Young, secondary forests that are constantly harvested lack the structure—and are not allowed time to develop—to support these rich, diverse aerial worlds. Only the largest, oldest trees—many hundreds of years old—host these critical ecosystems, and they're increasingly rare.
But hope is taking root in innovative restoration work. Working with Cal Poly Humboldt's professor Stephen Sillett and research associate Marie Antoine, we have begun transplanting fern mats, collected from the forest floor after winter storms, into the tallest trees in secondary redwood forests we conserve and manage, rebuilding canopy ecosystems from scratch. Working in our Van Eck forest near Fieldbrook, California, we've nurtured these ferns and then "planted" them hundreds of feet high in trees that will remain permanently protected. These specially selected trees are designated as "Potentially Elite Trees" (PETs)—the giants of tomorrow. Individual old trees are a lot like the oldest elephants in a herd; they contain the wisdom and resources to help an otherwise young forest function as an old forest, just as those old elephants guide their herds. And, we continue to harvest timber on these forests—on average a million board foot a year—while restoring the structure and function of old forests.
Now, we are expanding our efforts, adding huckleberry to our plantings to support new sky gardens. This patient approach creates homes for birds, salamanders, and countless insects, jump-starting processes that would naturally take centuries.
Redwood captures an essential truth: Forests are not just timber resources. They're living systems with lessons to teach us about building resilience in an uncertain future.
The Broadway experience provides audiences a glimmer of what happens when people encounter these giants in real life—and that's critically important. The more people recognize the vital role and wonder of forest canopies, the more momentum we build for their restoration and protection. But awareness must translate to action.
As debate rages on the role of federal forests and the need to protect their old and mature forests, there is also a major opportunity for action on private forests, where landowners' decisions will endure beyond a political cycle. For private forests, working forest conservation easements offer a proven path forward—providing landowners financial incentives to conserve and manage for older forests, develop complex structures, and designate future "PETs" that can support the function of old forests. This can transform forest recovery from centuries-long waits to achievable timelines within human lifespans.
Recent sweeping cuts to the National Park Service and U.S. Forest Service workforce threaten our old forests. Rangers and scientists do more than protect and research forests—they guide visitors to witness these majestic ecosystems firsthand. These cuts, applied "like an ax rather than a scalpel", endanger both the health of our forests and the transformative experiences for the public. When people stand beneath ancient trees and look upward, they understand viscerally why these forests and their canopies must be protected.
Protecting and restoring these overlooked canopy ecosystems has never been more urgent as climate change accelerates. Broadway's spotlight on redwoods helps us understand why what happens above our heads matters so much for our future below. When audiences gasp as Idina Menzel spins and embraces that massive trunk, they glimpse not just theatrical magic but a vision of what we stand to lose—and what we must fight to restore and preserve. The living world above demands our attention, protection, and active restoration—not just in California's iconic redwoods, but in every forest ecosystem on Earth.
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Trump Keeps Declaring Fake Emergencies That Make Our Real Emergency Worse
Pre-Trump, there was one true emergency on our planet—its rapid heating. Now of course there’s another—the implosion of economies.
Apr 09, 2025
We are living through a week unlike any other in my lifetime; maybe the last truly comparable stretch was the bank closure that marked the start of the FDR administration, but then the president was there to tell Americans they had nothing to fear; now we have a president who can only insist we “take our medicine.” He is constantly hyping the fear, and he is doing it with the constant invocation of a word—”emergency”—designed to send us into ever-deeper panic.
So I’ve been doing my best to think as calmly about that word as I can, with the hope that it will offer at least a bit of mental pathway through this horror and perhaps point toward the exit.
Let’s start with one of the less-noticed executive orders of the past week—by no means the most important, though if it is carried out it will probably affect more square miles of the U.S. than any other. This is a memorandum from Brooke Rollins, the secretary of agriculture and hence the overseer of America’s vast National Forests. In it she declares “an emergency situation on America’s National Forest system lands.”
This emergency on our national forests, in the administration’s view, is
due to uncharacteristically severe wildfires, insect and disease outbreaks, invasive species, and other stressors whose impacts have been compounded by too little active management.
For example: • The 2023 Wildfire Hazard Potential for the Unites States report identifies 66,940,000 acres of NFS lands under a very high or high fire risk.
• Roughly 78,800,000 acres of NFS lands are already experiencing, or are at risk of experiencing, insect and disease infestations.
As a result, the Forest Service is commanded to dramatically increase the amount of logging on these forests, exempting them from the longstanding system of oversight and challenge from communities and tribes affected by logging. Forest supervisors have been told to increase the volume of timber offered for sale on our lands by at least 25%.
Now, as many of us have been patiently explaining for years, the biggest cause of increased fire on our forests is the dramatic increase in global temperatures that has extended fire season in California virtually year-round, and for extra months on either end across the West. The biggest infestation of insects has come from pine bark beetles, and that is directly tied to a fast-warming climate. As Cheryl Katz explained almost a decade ago:
Bark beetles are a natural part of the conifer forest life cycle, regularly flaring and fading like fireworks. But the scope and intensity in the past two decades is anything but normal, scientists say, in large part because rising temperatures are preventing the widespread winter die-off of beetle larvae, while also enhancing the beetles’ killing power. Not only are the insects expanding into new territory, they’re also hatching earlier and reproducing more frequently. New infestations become full-blown with astonishing speed, and the sheer numbers of beetles exceeds anything forest experts have seen before. [One expert] says he’s seen spruce beetle epidemics in Utah so intense that when the insects had killed all the trees, they began attacking telephone poles.
To the extent that forests needed thinning to reduce wildfire risk (and it’s not at all clear that it does), the Biden administration worked to get the effort underway, spending $4 billion on the work—in some areas they were ahead of schedule, and in others behind, but overall
“the scale of spending is unprecedented,” said Courtney Schultz with Colorado State University. The forest policy expert said millions of acres had been through environmental review and were ready for work.
“If we really want to go big across the landscape—to reduce fuels enough to affect fire behavior and have some impact on communities—we need to be planning large projects,” she said.
Where the work was lagging, it was largely the result of a lack of bodies—something that will be considerably harder now that the Forest Service has laid off 3,400 workers. But at any rate, the new logging mandated under the “emergency declaration” isn’t the careful thinning work that might reduce fire intensity—instead, the forest industry is getting access to what it really wants, large stands of big trees. It is, in other words, a money grab by vested interests that supported Trump’s campaign.
That new cutting will make climate change worse, because as we now understand that letting mature forests continue to grow is the best way to sequester carbon. Meanwhile, cutting down those forests will mean far fewer trees to hold back the increasing downpours that climate change is producing. (A new study released yesterday showed that even in areas of the West where climate change is drying out forests and increasing blazes, there’s also a big jump in deluges—what one expert called an “eye-popping.”) I remember sitting down with the chief of the Forest Service under former President Bill Clinton, almost three decades ago, and even then he said the service’s internal data showed the greatest dollar value of the forestlands was water retention, not timber.
So, to summarize: We’ve invented an emergency where none exists. (The only thing even resembling an emergency in timber supply will come if we continue to tariff Canadian producers). We’ve abandoned most of the slow and patient work to deal with a problem, and replaced it with a boondoggle designed to increase short-term profits for Trump donors. That will juice the one actual emergency we do face worse—the rapid increase in global temperature—and it will make the effects of that emergency harder to deal with.
I’d submit that the “emergency” that Trump is actually responding to—the one that motivated his Big Oil donors to donate half a billion dollars in the last election cycle—is the rapid increase in renewable energy deployment.
This pattern more or less holds across the board. Each “emergency” we’re supposedly dealing with is, at worst, a long-term problem that needs serious and patient work, work that had begun in earnest under the Biden administration. Fentanyl deaths and illegal border-crossings—which if you can remember back three weeks ago were the original “emergency” justifying tariffs on Canada and Mexico—had both been falling sharply in the last year. The “emergency” justifying tariffing every country on Earth and also the penguins was the exact opposite of an emergency: a 50-year hollowing out of industrial areas, which again had begun to reverse because of the Inflation Reduction Act—specifically targeted by the Trump administration for reversal. As The Washington Postpointed out this week, a “stunning number” of battery and EV factories have been canceled in the last month, most of them in red states.
According to data from Atlas Public Policy, a policy research group, more projects were canceled in the first quarter of 2025 than in the previous two years combined. Those cancellations include a $1 billion factory in Georgia that would have made thermal barriers for batteries and a $1.2 billion lithium-ion battery factory in Arizona.
“It’s hard at the moment to be a manufacturer in the U.S. given uncertainties on tariffs, tax credits, and regulations,” said Tom Taylor, senior policy analyst at Atlas Public Policy. Hundreds of millions of dollars in additional investments appear to be stalled, he added, but haven’t been formally canceled yet.
“It’s working-class people in places like Georgia, North Carolina, Kentucky, Michigan, and Arizona that have seen some of these projects get canceled,” Keefe said. “And I can tell you who’s benefiting—China and other countries that are doubling down.”
I said before that there was one true emergency on our planet—its rapid heating. Now of course there’s another—the implosion of economies, likely to lead (if history is its usual guide) to military conflict. But I’d submit that the “emergency” that Trump is actually responding to—the one that motivated his Big Oil donors to donate half a billion dollars in the last election cycle—is the rapid increase in renewable energy deployment.
Reutersreported over the weekend that, for the first time in American history, less than half of electricity generated in March came from fossil fuels: “More power was instead generated using renewable sources such as wind and solar, which in March reached an all-time high of 83 terawatt hours.” It’s wonderful news, of course, heralding the chance at a new world. But that’s the crisis that Big Oil faces, and to fight it they’ve been willing to drag us all down.
It’s small comfort that the man they picked to do that job, Donald Trump, is so stupid that in the process of wrecking the American economy he’s actually putting big pressure on the oil industry too. He’s doing his best: Alone among industries, fossil fuel was exempted from tariffs, in what The Guardiancalled “a clear sign of the president’s fealty to his big oil donors over the American people,” and yesterday he commanded the Department of Justice to try and stop states from suing the oil industry or enforcing the Climate Superfund laws that charge Exxon et al. for the bridges and roads that taxpayers must constantly rebuild. (Trump comically called these efforts “extortion,” even as he attempts to blackmail every country on Earth, plus of course the penguins, with his tariffs). Trump’s even trying to boost coal this week, even though the data shows that 99% of the time it would be cheaper to build new renewables.
But the damage he’s doing to the world economy threatens to spill over to the oil industry—as the price of a barrel plummets, the chances of drilling new wells plummets too. According to the Times yesterday, Harold Hamm—Trump’s industry bundler—was wondering how to explain to the president that “when you get down to that $50 oil that you talked about, then you’re below the point that you’re going to drill, baby, drill.” Fossil fuel stocks have fallen sharply. Ha ha.
But in reality there’s one immediate and overwhelming emergency. It’s name is TrumpMuskVance, and it’s threatening to engulf almost everything in its unholy flames. People—even a few senators (thank you Cory Booker)—have begun pulling the alarms, and the volunteer fire company has begun to respond (such thanks to all who came out for the Hands Off rallies this weekend). We’re going to need quick wits, courage, incredibly hard work, and some real luck to put out this moronic inferno—but that’s the job of being a citizen in 2025. You matter as a political actor, more than any of us ever have before; I’ll make sure you know of the opportunities to put your talents to use!
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