AUDIO:

"The EcoNews Report," May 9, 2026.

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TOM WHEELER:

Welcome to the Econews Report. I'm your host this week, Tom Wheeler, executive director of EPIC, the Environmental Protection Information Center. And joining me is my friend and colleague, Kimberly Baker, the executive director of the Klamath Forest Alliance, a nonprofit organization that has been watching the Forest Service in the Klamath-Siskiyou Range for over 30 years, and is also the conservation director here at EPIC. And we're going to be talking about the Forest Service and changes to the Forest Service that the Trump administration have imposed. Welcome to the show, Kimberly.

So, Kimberly, you've been we often call it "bird-dogging" the Forest Service for over 25 years, both at EPIC and at the Klamath Forest Alliance. Do you want to give a little bit of your background on how you got engaged in Forest Service work and what that work has historically looked like? For those 25 years, because as I understand it, things are kind of different now in this last year. And it and I think hearing about how things worked will be useful to understand the contrast and to understand how things are not working now.

KIMBERLY BAKER:

Yeah, it's a major, major difference. Well, when I moved to Northern California in Orleans back in 1998, I started getting involved and volunteering with KFA because there was a timber sale just up the road from us. So I started volunteering and helping with comments and realized really that even one person can make a difference. And I was also really interested in everything that happened, what was happening around me. So that interest grew into the Pacific Northwest Forest of California. And since then, I have commented on nearly every timber sale on the Klamath, Shasta, Trinity, Sioux Rivers and Mendocino National Forest for for a few decades now. So I have a lot of on the ground experience and knowledge of the history of the place and what's happened, the communities, the peoples of this place. So, yeah, it's been a pretty deep dive career.

WHEELER:

Yeah, and so we're talking about an area that spans many millions of acres. I think in total these four forests are a little bit less than four million acres.

BAKER:

So we're five.

WHEELER:

Over five, there we go. Wow, it's even bigger than I thought. And to put a kind of a finer point on your reflection that an individual can make a lot of difference, over these 5 million acres, there are just a very few number of folks that are actively engaged in watching what the Forest Service is doing and participating in Forest Service management decisions. So we have you and you wear two hats, so it's the Klamath Forest Alliance and EPIC. We have our friends at the Klamath-Siskiyou Wildland Center, we have Conservation Congress, and we have SAFE, and a relatively newer player is the Mount Shasta Bio-Regional Ecology Center. But that's kind of it. So we're talking about maybe five organizations, which really means maybe five individuals that monitor over 5 million acres of public land..

BAKER:

It's, it's, yes ...

WHEELER:

Which is incredible.

BAKER:

It's kind of amazing, yes.

WHEELER:

Yeah, so close relationships with all these folks and these other sister environmental organizations. And so when you say that you've commented on nearly every timber sale, what historically has been the way that the Forest Service has developed timber sales and what has been the opportunity for the public and you as a representative of the public to engage in this planning decision process?

BAKER:

You know, it's all thanks to the National Environmental Policy Act, which is the reason why the public has an opportunity to participate in public land management. So, you know, there's different steps that projects go through. And we start early during the scoping process, cover a lot of ground, and then after an environmental assessment comes out, there's an opportunity to look at the actual proposed actions and see what's really being proposed on the ground and what those effects are. So we're able to comment on that. And after the Forest Service comes out with a decision, there was an opportunity to appeal or object. So you'd have a meeting with the district rangers and the forest supervisors and really talk about all the points of contention and issues that you have with the project in order to work something out to find better alternatives. And there has been a lot of success in changing how projects are made. I mean, the whole reason for NEPA is to make decisions better on public land. So those steps have made a lot of positive changes. Unfortunately, now a lot of those steps have been completely removed.

WHEELER:

Yeah, we'll get to that in just a moment. So I would also think it's probably fair to say that when looking at forest service projects, even timber sales, there's often components of which are good. There are components of which are relatively neutral and there are components that might be objectionable. And so it's never necessarily, well, it always requires a good deal of detailed investigation and knowledge of the land and what the needs are for forest management.

BAKER:

Oh, yeah. And well, let me just say that that is so true for the Pacific Northwest. I mean, we have so many rare and endemic species. We have threatened and endangered species. We have really steep, rugged watersheds, highly erodible, steep watersheds. Many of our watersheds are 303D listed under the Clean Water Act. And we have the highest concentration of wild and scenic rivers in the world. I mean, there are just so many special things about the Klamath-Siskiyou bioregion in general, which also includes southern Oregon, that makes this area globally significant. So, yeah.

WHEELER:

Yeah, I mean, so there's a high amount of responsibility. So I've only been looking at Forest Service timber sales now for about a decade. I started at EPIC in 2014 and you and I were working, I think our first big project together was a Westside salvage sale on the Klamath National Forest. And so I have a little bit of this kind of like before time knowledge where that was a full environmental impact statement, the kind of most robust environmental analysis that's done by the Forest Service for timber sales. It was a couple thousand acres in size, which seemed large at the time. And in those 10 years, I've seen this kind of massive shift from the Forest Service that they will no longer do the most in-depth environmental analysis. They will do skimpier, skinnier environmental analysis each time. Now we are typically seeing projects being approved through something called an environmental analysis, an EA or through categorical exclusions where they basically don't do any environmental analysis at all. Can you talk about like what projects used to look like or what the process used to be for reviewing a timber sale? What sort of documents did you use? How much engagement did the Forest Service seek from the public? Well...

BAKER:

The environmental analysis process over the years has definitely, like you said, has gotten much more skinny. Projects 10, 15 years ago were much more thorough, were much more in-depth and detailed that actually really gave that hard look that you need to assess what the impacts would be. So yeah, it's much more difficult these days to comment on a project when you don't have as much detail.

WHEELER:

And so in the last year, things have changed pretty dramatically. Trump came in on day one and effectively said, look, we want to get as much of the cut out from our national forests as possible and directed the Forest Service and other government agencies to streamline all of their processes to the maximum extent allowed under the law in order to get out the cut. The Forest Service has said that in the next four years, they anticipate that they will be able to increase their total timber volume by 25%. And we see that the Forest Service is taking actions to put it so that, to increase the timber volume even after the Trump administration is done by having longer range projects and programs in place that will feed into a more pro-timber regime into the future. Briefly, what has the Trump administration done to achieve this supposed streamlining?

BAKER:

Well, as you mentioned, those categorical exclusions, they have expanded. The agency has been instructed to use them as much as possible. So we're seeing dozens of them on each forest. Well, not dozens on each, but we are seeing multiple CEs come out currently. There are now emergency situations. Pretty much everything in the Pacific Northwest now is considered an emergency, which also severely truncates the public participation process and, yeah, and the NEPA regulations. So, yeah.

WHEELER:

So the NEPA regulations, we've somewhat covered on previous episodes of this show. So just to say, the Trump administration

BAKER:

has taken the public out of public lands pretty much.

WHEELER:

Yeah, so we've had a cut down on the times in which public participation is required and the amount of time that they are going to give to public participation across the board. So generally, yeah, the public is taken out of public decision-making.

BAKER:

Yeah, and the train has left the station. I have never been busier in my life than I have with all of the deadlines that are currently on my list. May has been a very intense month. There are thousands and thousands of acres at risk right now of logging everything in the name of wildfire prevention and fuels reduction. So logging the forest to save the forest. And as we know, the science points to that doesn't always work. It most often doesn't work, especially when you have wind driven events like we have now. I've heard it said that now we have wind events with fire in it, because that's really what is driving the high intensity fire severity effects these days.

WHEELER:

So well, to play kind of the devil's advocate here, for a long time, you had a lot of voices in the forestry world saying that we needed to do more, that we have this fire severity crisis where we are seeing the size of fires increase and the amount or the proportion of high severity fire in these fire events increasing as well. And so there was a call for more work to be done to make our forests more fire resilient. Is that what's happening here? Is this kind of being achieved or is it more complicated than that?

BAKER:

Well, it's all complicated, but there are different ways to go about preparing for wildfire. And it certainly isn't through wide-scale canopy removal in the back country, which many of these projects are proposing. And if we could do things with a scalpel rather than a chainsaw, that would probably make us much safer. Yeah, so I think that we need common-sense fire strategies, especially given these wind-driven events and the lack of effectiveness of fuel breaks and logging and the current kind of rhetoric that's happening now surrounding logging and wildfire.

WHEELER:

Well, so while the Trump administration is attempting to get out more of a cut in using fire and fire risk reduction as a justification for their actions, the Trump administration also seems like they are doubling down on fire suppression. So I think a lot of folks understand and appreciate that we have had too few fires on the ground in these fire prone forests, that fires were historically more active and that burning both cultural burns and wildfires helped moderate fire behavior by taking out biomass, by making conditions... Burning trees. By burning trees, by making things more safe, by getting rid of the layer of duff. So on one hand, while the Forest Service is increasing the amount of logging that they're doing, am I wrong to say that the Forest Service is still engaged in this fire suppression mindset?

BAKER:

Absolutely, yeah.

WHEELER:

So kind of contradictory behavior from the Forest Service here, so again, maybe a reason to question whether or not this is actually being done for fire suppression activities or fire risk reduction, or whether this is actually just to try to get more private timber profits off of public lands.

BAKER:

If you look at the individual projects, you will see that the latter is true. The projects that they're proposing, some are just, I am gonna sound very opinionated here, but they're preposterous. Yeah.

WHEELER:

You are listening to the Econews Report. We are talking about the Trump administration's effect on the Forest Service and the increase of logging locally. Well, so let's, let's get into some of these projects and maybe we can use them as a tool to understand what's happening at a more global level at the Forest Service. So you said that you are busier now than perhaps you've ever been at EPIC in this role. So what is the Forest Service proposing right now that you are, that you are working on or worried about?

BAKER:

Well, there are categorical exclusions being proposed on nearly every forest. So there are a lot of projects that are moving fast without a lot of environmental analysis. And there are huge landscape level, thousands and thousands of acres also being proposed. I mean, for instance, everything between Willow Creek and Weaverville and beyond has a plan for logging in the future. And it's little projects and it's big projects. And to me, every one is important because this place is so important. There's so much biodiversity and species richness and fisheries, water quality. There's so many issues involved in each one of them that each of them are important. Like for instance, this root fire salvage CE right over by Castle Crags had a pretty small footprint, less than 250 acres, but they discovered Porter for Cedar root rot disease right at the beginning of the roads that access the project area. It's within view of the Pacific Crest Trail. It's right past Castle Crags State Park and it's adjacent to Castle Crags Wilderness. So there's so many botanical species over there, even though it's a small project, it might have a big impact. And then there is, which we're currently litigating the South Fork Sacramento project, which would take over 12 Northern spotted owls and something like removing 900 acres of nesting and roosting habitat and exorbitant amount of habitat, completely eliminating habitat connectivity for some of the only reproductive spotted owl pairs.

WHEELER:

Let's focus on spotted owls as maybe this conservation conundrum here. So the Forest Service says that they are needing to do this fire risk reduction because absent fire risk reduction, there is an increased chance that fires may take out more than spotted owl habitat. But so they're saying that there's going to be long-term benefit to the species because there will be a reduced risk of fires into the future, but short-term impacts to the species after logging. And yet, I don't know if there's necessarily future spotted owls to benefit from this activity, even imagining that it's true that we are reducing the risk of high severity fire into the future. Spotted owls are on pace to go extinct by 2050 in this region. And so there's not really a long-term benefit to be had. All of these short-term impacts are punching the species when it's down and it's circling the drain.

BAKER:

Yeah, and oftentimes what the agency calls short-term impacts actually is long-term damage and habitat removal. And really the important thing to note is that the owl is functionally extinct throughout Washington and most of Oregon. The only source population left across its entire range is in the Klamath Siskiyous and the interior coast range here. So with the concentration of commercial logging and canopy removal that we have going on in what's left of the last source population for the entire range is what makes this issue so, so important. And it's not just the owl either. The owl is an umbrella species for hundreds of endemic rare species that are dependent on closed canopy mature forest.

WHEELER:

And these are things that you may not have ever heard of, like trinity bristle snails, and very, very rare endemic species of snail, mollusk.

BAKER:

salamanders, Del Norte salamanders. I mean, there is quite an impressive list of rare endemic species in our forests.

WHEELER:

but only the Northern Spotted Owl basically is listed under the ESA. And so it does a lot of heavy lifting when it comes to conservation. And is, so protection of the Northern Spotted Owl is important because the Northern Spotted Owls are fantastic and deserve protection, but they're also important to protect as protecting Northern Spotted Owls protects dozens of other species.

BAKER:

species, like basically old growth dependent species. And since there's only 5% old growth left, what is mature and late mature forest is our, is the next step to old growth. So we have to protect what's remaining of our mature forest and the forest canopy they provide.

WHEELER:

So we've talked a little bit about some projects that are being done using skimpier environmental analysis. So larger projects with less public participation, less experts looking at what the impacts are going to be on the ground. We also have some projects that are bypassing NEPA entirely. So the Forest Service is saying that there are emergency conditions on the ground that warrant going in and just completing projects without doing any environmental analysis. Yeah.

BAKER:

Well, you know, I have to say that was currently that was one instance and hopefully that will be nipped in the bud. I'm, I'm really, yeah, I don't even want that to become a trend. And I don't even know if we should mention that actually.

WHEELER:

Yeah, let's talk about this one real quick though. So near the Trinity Alps Resort, which a lot of our listeners may be familiar with, out by Trinity Lake, there was a project. What happened on this project and what is the Forest Service's purported justification for going in to do this work?

BAKER:

Well, it's called the Peak Fire Emergency Response. In 2025, there was a fire that was coming out from the wilderness towards the lake, out of the Trinity Alps wilderness towards the lake. And so before the smoke was cleared, the Forest Service prepared some timber sales and timber sale contracts and claimed that it was an emergency and said that they needed to hurry up and log in these occupied Northern Spotted Owl home ranges before the limited operating periods kicked in this winter. So in November and December, loggers were out there very busily cutting down trees as quickly as possible in occupied Northern Spotted Owl home ranges. Some of the only two reproductive owls in the area which is important because they're providing the source population for the rest of the area. But yeah.

WHEELER:

Well, so just to be clear, the fire was out, there was a fire nearby, the fire was out. And yet, the Forest Service said that the existence of the previous fire and conditions on the ground warranted them bypassing all normal processes to go in and log without fire. Except, I want the public to be aware of this, because this is not the first time the Forest Service has tried something like this. EPIC, as you are aware, Kimberly, because you were the one to help us bring this case, won a lawsuit on the Mendocino National Forest on some lawless logging as well. There's been litigation brought in Oregon on similar abuse of this lawless logging. And as you said, this has maybe not spread further locally yet, but I think it is a risk that is absolutely present to our forest that the Trump administration likes to call everything an emergency and use that as a means to bypass the normal way of operating. They've shut down wind energy development on the East Coast because they've said it's a national emergency because it threatens homeland security. And so we see this repeating playbook by which the Trump administration is acting where they declare an emergency and then they tell the courts, trust us. And courts are often largely deferential to the administrative state. And so I'm concerned that this is a process by which we're likely to see future projects like this.

BAKER:

Well, the fact of the matter is that we already have dozens of projects that aren't going that route that are a massive threat and impact.

WHEELER:

That's true. That's very true. All right. So what other projects are you watching these days? And what are the, what are, what can you glean about like the state of the forest service from these projects?

BAKER:

They're busy at work, certainly. Just mentioned those few over by Castle Crags, but we have, yeah, we mentioned the projects over by Trinity Lake. There's another categorical exclusion project called the Trinity Divide, and it proposes over 2,000 acres of removing canopy down to 30 and 40% in an area that is adjacent to clear cuts everywhere. So it's kind of ridiculous that the Forest Service is choosing the areas where they have big trees and calling it fire safety when they're right next to highly flammable plantations. So there's that project. And then just across the lake on Trinity Lake, the North Trinity Project proposes thousands and thousands of commercial walking all around the communities and into the back country adjacent to the wilderness.

And then if we change regions, like I mentioned before, pretty much everything from Willow Creek to Weaverville is proposed for logging. Six Rivers has the 2022 Lightning Complex looking to do a lot of post-fire logging and also thinning plantations, which could be a really good thing. There's the Big Ranch Project, which is one of the largest out there. It includes over 13,000 acres of commercial logging, and it stretches from Sawyer all the way to Big Bar. So that's like 30 to 40,000 acre footprint. So Big Ranch Project is one to watch out for. It's huge. And then they have another one all around Junction City that is being proposed as well. It's a smaller footprint than Big Ranch, but we're talking about the entire Trinity River corridor and all of those tributaries are proposed for logging. And there's also Weaverville projects all around Weaverville that are being proposed.

WHEELER:

I mean, it kind of, it almost seems like we're her projects not being proposed these days. Right. Right. So there is certainly what it seems like an expansion of logging in the last year that I think should have folks concerned. If folks want to be better engaged and to influence the Forest Service or want to take action to ensure that our public lands are well managed, what would you suggest folks do?

BAKER:

Well you can get on Forest Service websites and sign up for project updates and of course read the EPIC e-news.

WHEELER:

And go to wildcalifornia.org to sign up. We often have action alerts go out on projects that we, we can always use some help in letting the forest service know that the public is watching them. Cause I, I think that there's still some benefit to, to letting district rangers know that 600 people are concerned about a timber sale that they're working on. Yeah. Well, Kimberly, I, I, I can attest that you've been putting in just extremely long hours and have been just running this gauntlet of project after project after project with very small public comment periods, so you've been working your butt off and I really appreciate it. And I want to have that out there in the, the, the larger ethos that are the larger world that you are, you're just hustling so hard on these timber sales. So thank you.

BAKER:

You're welcome. Yeah, the two week comment period, you know, we used to have over a month and now, yeah, two week comment period on, on massive projects and with, with so many special circumstances is, yeah, it's been a challenge.

WHEELER:

Well, thank you so much for joining the Econ News, Kimberly, and thank you for your work.

BAKER:

Awesome. Thank you, Tom.

WHEELER:

All right, join us again next week on this time and channel for more environmental news from the North Coast of California.