Consider the dead tree.
To the living things of the forest and to the environmentalists who love them, a dead tree is critical infrastructure. A standing one — a snag — may house beetle larvae, which are eaten by woodpeckers, who excavate the softening wood for nests, which are then abandoned and taken up by other birds or small mammals, who raise their own young there. A downed log’s cambium soaks up water and holds it like a sponge, even through drought; as it decays, it enriches the soil. Cycles begin anew.
“There is no more important structural component of a forest ecosystem than a dead tree or a down log,” said Chad Hanson, the director and principal ecologist of the John Muir Project. “Nothing even comes close.”
The federal government sees a dead tree as a sort of time bomb. In recent decades, and especially under President Donald Trump, land management agencies have seized on dead trees as a type of “fuel” powering destructive wildfires — despite a growing body of scientific research casting doubt on this position.
“We have an abundance of timber at high risk of wildfires in our National Forests,” U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins said last year, announcing an emergency authorization aimed at expanding logging on federal land.
The Trump administration’s desire to reinvigorate the domestic timber industry has led close observers of land management agencies to worry that, for industry interests, the dead tree is propping open a doorway: A salvage-logging operation to remove dead trees might necessitate removing more valuable live ones, and once that path is breached, it’s easier to go back for more.
“They’re looking for the bigger trees,” said Will Harlan, the southeast director of the Center for Biological Diversity.
And in Western North Carolina, nearly two years after Tropical Storm Helene, the dead tree remains a potent symbol of regional trauma. To Dan and Joanne Lazar, who estimate that more than a third of the trees around their Blue Ridge Parkway-adjacent home fell in Helene, it also looks like another disaster in wait.
“There’s so much down wood that it’s like a bonfire ready to ignite,” Dan said recently.
“We were very, very concerned, any time there was any type of drought, that all it would take is one cigarette and it would be devastating,” Joanne added.
Park Service tactics questioned
All of these perspectives have come to a head at the Parkway, where later this summer the National Park Service will begin what it calls a “hazardous fuel debris removal project” in areas where Helene felled large swaths of trees. Parkway officials have said the work, which could begin as soon as September, is necessary to protect nearby homes and “natural and cultural resources” from wildfires that could feed on the debris.
But critics, including a slew of environmental organizations, have contended that the project — even after a recent narrowing in scope — represents far more risk than it does risk-abatement.
Though they agree that some post-storm debris, especially smaller material that burns easily, could make homes more vulnerable to fire, they’re unsettled by the Park Service’s chosen methods, which stand to include commercial salvage logging. They believe the work could have an outsized effect on sensitive species and water resources. They’re alarmed that the Park Service has adopted tactics that would allow it to sidestep standard environmental impact reviews and public comment periods in favor of fast-tracking what it calls an emergency response.
And they say it represents a drastic shift for the nation’s most-visited Park Service unit — the incursion of commercial forces, a break with the agency’s preservationist mission — that will be impossible to walk back. (A spokesperson declined Asheville Watchdog’s request to interview Parkway superintendent Tracy Swartout for this story and requested a list of written questions. The agency has not responded to those questions, which were sent July 15.)
“If they can log along the Blue Ridge Parkway, they will be logging in Great Smoky Mountains National Park and in some of our other most treasured and beloved places, and that’s not what the American public wants,” Harlan said. “This is the frontline and the next frontier of where this extractive industrial logging complex is targeting, and we have to fight for the Parkway in our backyard.”
“Under the leadership of President Donald J. Trump”
The Park Service first announced the project in late April: the “mechanical and manual removal of selected downed and damaged trees” across nearly 2,900 acres, stretching from Asheville to southern Virginia. A press release described it as “the latest in a number of federal recovery efforts advancing under the leadership of President Donald J. Trump in response to Hurricane Helene damage.” In lieu of a public comment period, the agency offered a series of open-house-style informational meetings in early May.
One meeting took place on a drizzly afternoon at the Parkway’s Asheville visitor center. Attendees in dripping raincoats crowded around posters outlining project areas. Others lined up to chat with Park Service employees, including Swartout, who tried to assuage concerns about the consequences of sending heavy machinery into the sloping forests that hug the Parkway.
“If there’s an [archaeological] site and we know that it’s there, we’re going to try to avoid it,” Swartout said. “If there’s a wetland, we’re going to try to avoid it. There’s standing live trees — we’re going to try to avoid those. So avoidance is really the biggest part of it.”
Already, though, the conservation community was wary. In an Instagram post, Boone mayor and Endangered Species Coalition organizer Dalton George called out the environmental risks and limited public input of what he described as “the biggest project to impact the Blue Ridge Parkway in our lifetimes.”
The Asheville-based environmental nonprofit MountainTrue acknowledged that some debris clearance may be necessary but decried as “based more on emotion than facts” the notion that removing vegetation more than 100 feet away from homes reduces wildfire risk. “We’ll leave the discussion about why the public has to bail out homeowners who build right next to a national park for another time,” the organization added.
Josh Kelly, MountainTrue’s resilient forests director, was among those huddled inside the visitor center. He was eager to gather information — the maps showing project areas hadn’t yet been publicly posted — but skeptical of the event’s purpose.
“My sense is that this decision has already been made, and it will take a lot of political pressure to turn this around or change it,” Kelly said. “This is an open house to defuse public input, not to give the public a chance to have input. This is a dog-and-pony show.”
Kelly and other conservationists did come away from the open houses with more details on the project, including that the Park Service, partnering with the U.S. Forest Service, would seek to partially pay for the project with proceeds from salvage logging, and that it would focus on removing large-diameter timber while leaving behind smaller pieces of wood, known as “slash,” a standard logging process that guards against erosion but can also make an area more vulnerable to wildfire.
After complaints, the project is scaled back
But attempts to engage with Parkway leadership were rebuffed, said Spencer Scheidt, an attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center. The Park Service has declined to provide documents, including research and data underpinning its assertions about fire danger, Scheidt said, and officials weren’t interested in receiving feedback about the environmental damages associated with salvage logging.
Earlier this month, a letter from the SELC — written by Scheidt and signed by representatives of a half-dozen prominent conservation organizations, including Kelly, Harlan and George — warned Swartout that the project was environmentally and legally precarious. The letter reflected two braided threads of concern: one, that the Park Service was reliant on faulty science; the other, that it was making procedural decisions unsupported by law.
Less than a week later, the Park Service quietly announced major changes to the project. The revised version focused on about a third of its original area. A little under 500 acres would still be targeted for mechanical treatment, the category that includes salvage logging with heavy machinery. About 400 acres were slated for possible aerial treatment — helicopter logging — all of them in the Elk Mountain area north of Asheville. A couple of zones were taken off the map entirely, including a section near Rattlesnake Lodge, an area environmentalists considered particularly vulnerable. The remainder, nearly 2,000 acres, was pushed down the road, with officials saying that they might be tackled by hand crews with light mechanical equipment but that they’d require additional research.
It’s unclear whether the change was a direct response to environmental concerns, though Scheidt said the agency notified some of the signatories directly. (The Park Service did not issue a press release about the changes to the project.) While the changed scope might pose less immediate harm, Scheidt said, most of the concerns remained, especially given that much of the project was simply delayed rather than canceled.
“It seems like the agency is also retaining the discretion to do more logging in the future,” he said. “It’s hard to say how big this will actually end up being. It seems like just the opening logging salvo.”
The project update has created a series of shifting timelines. Only the remaining mechanical treatments may start on the original schedule, likely sometime in September, according to the Park Service. To avoid disturbing bat and bird populations, helicopter logging won’t begin until at least November. Everything else is delayed indefinitely.
Project sidesteps public and environmental reviews
This development further confuses what has already been a chief frustration for the project’s critics. With most federal projects, the Endangered Species Act requires agencies to consult with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to determine how they could affect endangered species. That process typically takes 90 days and could result in recommendations for changes to the project to avoid harm. The Parkway’s land is home to several listed species, including several bats, the Carolina northern flying squirrel and the spruce-fir moss spider as well as the eastern hellbender salamander, which has been proposed for protections.
But the Park Service appears not to have undertaken such a consultation. Instead, according to the SELC, it is poised to skip that process by citing a rule that allows for alternate procedures in the case of emergencies. Environmentalists have responded: What emergency? Though the agency has made it clear that this is a post-Helene project, by the time it begins, it will have been nearly two years since the storm. Trump last year declared the nation’s timber production an emergency and loosened regulations to allow for more, but that order didn’t affectthe Park Service.
“We have had time for seven 90-day consultation periods since the storm,” the SELC letter noted. “Our region’s imperiled species should not pay the price for the Park Service’s failure to use that time productively.”
Similarly, the National Environmental Policy Act requires agencies to prepare and release documents that tell the public how their actions will affect the environment. But the law allows for several exceptions, called categorical exclusions. Swartout told a Watchdog reporter at the May open house that the agency was skipping this disclosure process via a categorical exclusion “related to removing debris,” though she gave a corresponding number, H3, that doesn’t appear in the Department of the Interior’s list of exclusions usable by the Park Service.
According to the SELC, the agency has cited an exclusion borrowed from the U.S. Forest Service that allows for debris removal in the wake of a disturbance. But the SELC, citing documents from the rulemaking process, has argued that the exclusion was never meant to facilitate salvage logging.
Together, these decisions have kept substantial parts of the project out of the public eye. Several people interviewed for this story noted that they echo the actions of the U.S. Forest Service, which has used similar tactics to obscure the details of logging projects, including recent examples in North Carolina’s national forests.
But the Park Service is not the Forest Service. The two have fundamentally different mandates, the former focused on preservation, the latter on using lands in a variety of ways, including by extracting timber for economic gain. Char Miller, a public lands historian who teaches at Pomona College in California, called it “a remarkable moment in which the conflation between the Forest Service and the Park Service’s behavior seems evident.”
The emphasis on emergency, with the implication that devastating fires are imminent, “strikes me as a rhetorical move that can have damaging impact on the land itself and, frankly, on the reputation of the Park Service,” Miller said. “If it’s simply going to do what other land management agencies like the Forest Service have done — ‘we need to suppress all fire everywhere at all times’ — then it’s just undercut its own mission.”
A ‘meat cleaver’ versus a scalpel
The Parkway has reported that Hurricane Helene “impacted” more than 12,000 acres of canopy along its 469 miles. As the Park Service has sought to fully reopen the road, a goal it says it will reach this year, it has already removed some immense debris loads, including 350,000 cubic feet — about four Olympic-size swimming pools’ worth — in the first six weeks of repairs.
The Helene blowdown along the Parkway takes several forms: downed logs, now half-hidden among verdant undergrowth; bare snags jutting starkly through the canopy; neatly stacked piles lining trails restored by volunteer crews. It remains clear that the storm suddenly and drastically altered the landscape.
Where the Park Service, the project’s critics and outside scientists diverge, sometimes wildly, is on the question of whether the altered landscape is significantly more dangerous.
“This was an unprecedented event that we are all still figuring out how best to respond to — and will be dealing with for at least 10 years,” Andy Tait, the senior forestry director for the Asheville-based forestry and conservation organization Ecoforesters, said in an email.
Ecoforesters has not stated an opinion on the merits of the Parkway project, and Tait emphasized that he could speak only to post-Helene fire risk and management more broadly. There is good reason to remove fuels that “put human values at risk,” he said. That could mean clearing areas immediately around homes or communities, or reopening forest roads that provide access for wildland firefighters and serve as firebreaks.
But there are also tradeoffs, he said, especially for removing large logs. The least-impactful options, such as helicopter logging, are also the most expensive; using heavy machinery to move them out by ground is cheapest and most disturbing. And in many places, down wood is a good thing; the young forests and meadows created by Helene have been a boon for some species — ruffled grouse, golden-winged warblers and other foraging mammals — that had been flagging.
“The big issue will be balancing the need to protect human values [structures and even trails] while maintaining ecological integrity and leaving some, even disturbed, areas ‘natural,’” Tait wrote.
Fire experts have, in recent years, advocated for a set of best practices for protecting homes from wildfire, focusing on continuing to remove hazards and minimizing fire in the 100 feet around a home. (For homes on slopes, that zone can extend to 200 feet.) The design of the Parkway, which snakes through residential neighborhoods and wilder places alike, means that some private properties are nestled tightly against its boundaries. Several critics of the project agreed that some amount of fuel-reduction close to homes is appropriate.
But the Park Service has given little indication of its standards for making these decisions. One poster featured at the open houses suggested that it was relying on a 100-meter (328 feet) buffer around homes, far larger than the industry standard. And some parts of the initial project area bordered no structures at all. This has given environmentalists the impression that the Park Service is using a meat cleaver for a job that needs a scalpel.
“It should be much more surgical than it currently is,” said Harlan, who advocated for the Park Service to focus on the 100 feet around the Parkway itself, which would turn the road into an effective firebreak. “That does the most good in terms of wildfire risk reduction.”
A Watchdog analysis, combining publicly available property records with the Park Service’s work maps, found about 150 properties with structures that appeared to be within 100 meters of the Parkway boundary near project areas in Buncombe County. Many of them were homes in some of the county’s wealthiest communities, including The Ramble, Biltmore Forest and the neighborhoods off of Town Mountain Road. They also included Deerfield Episcopal Retirement Community, an apartment complex, and part of the Department of Veterans Affairs’ local medical center.
About 50 of those properties appeared to have structures within 100 feet of Parkway land.
Biltmore Forest town manager Jonathan Kanipe said the town has already assuaged most of its post-Helene fire worries: It lost an estimated 10,000 to 20,000 trees and removed more than 400 cubic yards of debris from its three square miles. It recently passed an ordinance aimed at encouraging property owners to remove remaining debris from private land. The town was grateful for the Park Service tackling blowdown in areas it can’t reach, he said, and in meetings with Parkway officials, he emphasized the need to focus on places closest to private property and minimize the impact of heavy machinery.
The politicization of fire
Conservationists and the SELC have argued that the project’s scope and methods may make matters worse. Fire ecologists have found that, rather than reducing the risk of fast-moving wildfires, the large-scale removal of downed trees degrades the environment and makes it more vulnerable to conflagrations. Trees, dead or alive, hold water, which gives forests natural protections. When they’re removed, those defenses are gone, and smaller debris that burns more readily is typically left behind.
“It’s not just that this project is ecologically destructive and ineffective at protecting adjacent communities — it’s actually counterproductive, actively counterproductive,” said Hanson, the John Muir Project ecologist, who has spent his career studying the subject. “The answer is to focus on the communities themselves, on the homes themselves, on any human structure that’s immediately adjacent to the forest.”
To Hanson, who has written extensively about the politicization of fire, the Parkway project marks an evolution in what he calls the catastrophic wildfire narrative. In the early 1990s, he said, after efforts to save imperiled species stymied logging on public lands, the U.S. Forest Service changed its tune: It stopped talking about timber production and started speaking of forest health and wildfire protection. But those projects, he said, have historically been used to open the door to more logging.
Now, he said, that posture has been adopted by other federal agencies, including the Park Service. He described a politics of fear in which purported fire risks allow agencies to pursue extractive projects regardless of their environmental detriment. Much of that discourse has focused on the western United States, where the deadliest and most destructive of recent fires have taken place. Now, he said, the narrative has made its way east.
“Unless people get wise to it and start actively pushing back, we will lose national parks and wilderness areas and national monuments in every real way except their names,” Hanson said. “That’s what’s at stake.”
Asheville Watchdog is a nonprofit news team producing stories that matter to Asheville and Buncombe County.