Amid Pisgah logging plans post-Helene, Forest Service shuts out public
The Dobson Knob area, bisected by the Mountains-to-Sea Trail, is one of the last roadless, wild places in Southern Appalachia. The Forest Service has obtained permission to salvage in the Dobson Knob inventoried roadless area. Southern Environmental Law Center photo
In early April, a U.S. Forest Service office in East Tennessee’s Cherokee National Forest issued a memo inviting the public to weigh in on its recovery operations in the wake of Tropical Storm Helene. The storm had felled trees across tens of thousands of acres of the forest, the agency said, and those trees posed the risk of fueling wildfires.
Now, it was proposing what it called “heavy fuel reduction” on nearly 3,000 acres, including through “the use of commercial harvest” — in other words, salvage logging.
The letter, technically known as a scoping notice, included several maps showing which areas of the forest were under discussion. It noted that Cherokee National Forest officials had already met with other expert stakeholders, including the Nature Conservancy. They were giving members of the general public two more weeks to make their voices heard.
Nothing about this process of transparency and public input, which National Forest offices undergo regularly for timber sales and other projects, would be unusual were it not for how it contrasts with a parallel situation just across the state line.
At the same time the Cherokee National Forest was planning its salvage-logging projects, Forest Service officials in North Carolina were doing the same — while keeping them mostly hidden from public view.
Arguing that downed trees constitute a public safety emergency, the National Forests in North Carolina, the regional Forest Service division headquartered in Asheville, got permission to skirt the environmental impact process that typically precedes logging projects. It also received the green light to log in one of the region’s last large roadless areas, where federal policy typically protects ecosystems from industry and development. And it issued scant public notice about where, when and how it would open the forests to salvage logging.
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‘Stronger Than The Storm’
In a March 3 press release, the Forest Service did acknowledge that it intended to pursue salvage projects on about 2,200 acres of the Pisgah National Forest. But it did not specify where logging would take place, nor did it give the public a way to comment on the projects or learn more about them.
Public records reviewed by Asheville Watchdog, including internal communications, show the Forest Service has planned 15 projects over 2,100 acres of the Pisgah. They range from the wild, roadless Dobson Knob area, north of Marion in McDowell County, to several areas abutting the Appalachian Trail, and to the Shope Creek area east of Asheville.
The records show that the agency began planning the salvage projects in November, just over a month after Helene blew through North Carolina. They also position the need to expedite the projects as a primarily economic measure, with wildfire prevention positioned as a secondary concern or going unmentioned.
“They already knew some of the salvages they were planning on doing, and that was six, seven months ago at this point,” said Spencer Scheidt, an attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center, which obtained many of the records and shared them with The Watchdog. “And the agency hasn’t tried to involve the public in that whole timeframe. We could’ve had a whole comment period come and go by this time.”
Adam Rondeau, a spokesperson for the National Forests in North Carolina, defended the decision to elide public input, saying that “urgent health and safety needs” dictated the agency’s decision making.
“In light of what we witnessed during spring fire season, which highlighted how Helene has compounded the threat of potentially catastrophic wildfires in these areas, time is of the essence, and work needed to begin as soon as possible to reduce fuel loads,” Rondeau said in an email.
Last month, in response to questions from The Watchdog, the Forest Service posted an online update about its salvage projects, which showed eight sales across more than 700 acres. It has acknowledged but not fulfilled a Freedom of Information Act request by The Watchdog seeking records including its contracts with timber companies and its plans to mitigate environmental damage.
Environmental advocates said that while salvage logging may well be appropriate in many of these cases, skipping public input keeps the agency from having to answer hard questions about the projects’ efficacy in fire prevention or about the building of logging roads in unspoiled areas.
It also plays into larger concerns. The Forest Service has come under fire for implementing a management plan that calls for a dramatic increase in the logging of the Pisgah and Nantahala national forests, a plan that a Watchdog investigation in April found relied on faulty data. President Donald Trump’s administration, citing both wildfire risk and a desire to invigorate the domestic lumber industry, has also ordered the agency to ramp up timber production, sparking widespread fears of indiscriminate logging.
“They are not responding to the public,” said Will Harlan, the southeast director for the Center for Biological Diversity. “They don’t want the public involved, because the public wants to protect more of the forest, and they want to log more of it.”
FIRE AND WOOD
Since its birth at the turn of the 20th century, the Forest Service has balanced on a tense line between commerce and environmental stewardship. Its mandate has always been to manage public lands as not just an ecological treasure but also a repository of renewable resources — especially timber.
When Helene blew down what the agency estimated to be more than 100,000 acres of vegetation in Western North Carolina’s national forests, the damage presented a tangle of problems and opportunities.
Will Harlan, the southeast director for the Center for Biological Diversity said he worries that roads built in the Dobson Knob area for the salvage project will give the Forest Service access, and an excuse, to stage standard logging projects there in the future. Southern Environmental Law Center photo
As the spring wildfire season approached, fire experts warned that Western North Carolina was vulnerable. The National Interagency Fire Center predicted a more-active-than-usual season along the swath the storm cut across the Southeast and Appalachia. New holes in the canopy meant that sunlight would reach more grasses and leaves on the ground, baking them into tinder. The longer that downed trees and limbs dried, the greater the risk for ever-larger pieces to fuel a fire. The biggest trees felled by Helene would take more than a season to dry, but they could pose impediments to fire crews; firefighters worried about blowdown hampering their response as much as they did the small stuff feeding fires in the first place.
“The Pisgah National Forest has already experienced wildfire activity in areas with heavy blowdowns from Helene,” Rondeau said. “In these cases, debris left by the hurricane created additional challenges in containing the blazes through increased dead vegetation and making the terrain more difficult. By taking action now to remove these heavy fuels before any significant drying can occur, we are mitigating the chances of a catastrophic wildfire in at-risk communities.”
Asked by The Watchdog about the impetus for these projects, Rondeau pointed only to public safety concerns. But much of that wood — the trees large, straight and solid enough to be cut into boards — holds economic promise, too. By selling salvage rights to logging companies, the Forest Service can get paid to have someone else do what it already wants done: removing dead wood from the forests. Riva Duncan, the vice president of Grassroots Wildland Firefighters and a former fire manager in North Carolina’s national forests, said she believes the equation holds up, despite valid concerns about the impact of logging.
“It’s a tough one,” said Duncan, who has a forestry background and began her career in timber. “The Forest Service, they’re usually always the bad guys when it comes to salvage. But the national forests are set up to try to get some sort of economic benefit for the taxpayers, right? They’re obligated to do that, and they try to do it the best way they can.”
Critics of salvage logging have said its utility as a fire-suppression tool is overstated. In a February letter urging the Forest Service to tread cautiously with its salvage plans, the SELC and a group of conservation organizations argued that the practice is mostly an economic one. They cited as evidence the Forest Service’s own handbook, which defines salvage as being used “to recover value that would otherwise be lost.”
They also pointed to studies suggesting that salvage logging can increase fire risk in the short term. Much of that complaint is an extension of one frequently lobbed at logging in general: The practice often leaves behind a great deal of slash, leftover wood that’s too small, gnarled or rotten to be commercially viable. Because it’s smaller and drier, slash is more fire-prone. Especially in salvage logging, where margins are thinner, logging companies aren’t likely to dispose of slash unless they’re forced to, Scheidt, the SELC attorney, said. (Draft contracts for the Pisgah projects show no requirements for slash.)
“There are places where salvage logging might make sense, but the hard truth is logging makes wildfires worse, especially the kind of logging that the Forest Service wants to do here, where they are going to leave behind a lot of slash,” Harlan said. “They are going to get the big trees out, and the big trees are the most fire-resistant. But they’re the most commercially valuable, and that’s what the Forest Service is seeking.”
The counterargument, Duncan noted, is that slash also decomposes more quickly, especially in North Carolina’s humid climate, keeping its fire-risk window smaller. Though larger trees are less apt to burn quickly, they pose more risk the longer they dry.
There’s another temporal complication to salvage logging: If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to salvage it, its value plummets. This motivates the Forest Service to get salvage projects off the ground as fast as it can.
“Why is the Forest Service doing salvage sales?” wrote Alice Brown, the timber contracting officer for the National Forests in North Carolina, in a January email to an associate regional director of the Appalachian Trail Conservancy, who had apparently posed the question in a previous meeting. “It’s economically responsible to utilize the value of the damaged timber to have it pay for itself out of the woods. Otherwise, if we don’t respond timely the wood degrades and there is no value to the market.”
‘HEARTBREAKING AND COMPLETELY UNNECESSARY’
The scope of the salvage projects may have come to light only because they interrupted another Helene-recovery operation: Early this year, volunteers working to repair a heavily damaged section of the Appalachian Trail near Iron Mountain, a little more than an hour northeast of Asheville, tipped off the SELC that they were ordered to stop work so the Forest Service could prepare the area for logging.
Rondeau did not directly answer a question about whether the Forest Service ordered trail workers to halt recovery. He said it “continues to work closely with the Appalachian Trail Conservancy to plan the removal of downed trees in the vicinity of the Trail.”
The SELC, knowing only that the Forest Service was plotting some sort of salvage plan, sent its first letter to the agency on Feb. 28, a Friday. The following Monday, March 3, the Forest Service posted the sparsely detailed press release that served as the only public notice of the projects; bidding for one project, in Mitchell County near the Tennessee border, was already underway.
The Forest Service later submitted that press release as its scoping letter, the document that’s legally required to kick off the timber-harvesting process. Scheidt said scoping notices typically lay out the broad terms of projects — where they’ll take place, how many acres they’ll cover, what methods will be used — and invite public input.
The regional Forest Service division, headquartered in Asheville, got permission to skirt the environmental impact process that typically precedes logging projects. It also received the green light to log in one of the region’s last large roadless areas, where federal policy typically protects ecosystems from industry and development. Watchdog photo by Starr Sariego
The press release achieved the first part only in the broadest terms, lumping more than a dozen projects into one, and the second not at all. It didn’t give any information on whether new roads would be built, Scheidt noted, nor whether any endangered species would be affected.
“If we had received this as a scoping notice, we would have challenged it as legally insufficient,” he said. (The SELC has not filed any lawsuit related to the salvage projects, but Scheidt said it continues to monitor them closely.)
Rondeau said the “methods and degree” of scoping efforts vary from project to project and that the salvage projects were “vastly different in scale and complexity.” Asked why the Forest Service didn’t provide scoping details on each project, he noted that some additional details were posted during the advertising period for each project. They were removed from the Forest Service’s website after that advertising period ended.
After a scoping notice, Scheidt said, the Forest Service would usually move on to its environmental evaluations. Some smaller projects don’t require a detailed study, but for most, it would issue an initial review of potential environmental impacts. Then there would be a public comment period, usually 30 or 45 days, before the agency issues its final assessment. That would trigger another period, when dissatisfied parties could file administrative objections to the plan. After that, the only way to interject would be a lawsuit.
The SELC soon learned that the National Forests in North Carolina had gotten the Forest Service’s permission to skip much of that process. Alongside documents detailing the 15 projects, it obtained (and later shared with The Watchdog) records showing that Forest Service officials in North Carolina successfully argued the salvage projects met a provision in federal regulations that allows them to speed past environmental reviews when they “must be undertaken to address urgent response or recovery activities.” The agency largely cited fire risk, which it said “pose an urgent public health and safety concern.”
Instead of the detailed environmental statement usually required, according to the document, the Forest Service would instead “take into account the probable environmental consequences of the emergency action and mitigate foreseeable adverse environmental effects to the extent practical.” Kenderick Arney, the regional forester for the southern region of the Forest Service, signed off on the plan, which also went through Christopher B. French, then the deputy chief of the National Forest System. (French, now the acting associate chief of the Forest Service, issued a memo in April telling forest officials to develop plans to ramp up logging, in accordance with Trump’s orders to do so.)
It’s not clear what those mitigations look like. The Forest Service has not discussed them publicly. It has not responded to The Watchdog’s request for details. In a cache of records obtained by the SELC and shared with The Watchdog, material related to environmental protection — including mitigation plans and spreadsheets showing how the projects could affect endangered species — was heavily redacted. The Forest Service argued that because those documents were created while the project was still in the works, they were “deliberative” and not subject to public disclosure.
Emails reviewed by The Watchdog show that the agency did share some of its mitigation plans with at least one outside party: the Appalachian Trail Conservancy, which it consulted on a handful of projects near the trail. The Conservancy’s spokesperson did not respond to multiple requests for comment by email and phone.
In this void of information, conservationists said they could only speculate about how the projects will affect the forest’s ecology. Josh Kelly, the resilient forests director for the Asheville-based environmental nonprofit MountainTrue, said he was particularly worried about the four endangered bat species that live in the Pisgah. The Forest Service drew up its logging plans during the winter months, when bats hibernate, Kelly noted, meaning it likely did no meaningful surveys on how logging during the summer will affect the species.
Bats love to roost in dead and decaying trees, Harlan said, and should the blowdowns be left unlogged, they would likely provide more ecological value, enriching soil, sheltering salamanders and flying squirrels, acting as food stores for woodpeckers.
Kelly and Harlan said they were especially alarmed that the Forest Service had obtained permission to salvage in the Dobson Knob inventoried roadless area. Since 2001, Forest Service policy has protected large swaths of land — some 58.5 million acres nationwide — from logging and road-building. The Dobson Knob area, bisected by the Mountains-to-Sea Trail, is one of the last roadless, wild places in southern Appalachia, Harlan said.
“It’s a spectacular part of the Pisgah,” he said. “To be logging in that corridor, in that viewshed, is heartbreaking and completely unnecessary.”
Harlan said he was confused by the plan to log in the remote region in part because it’s the kind of place where natural fire plays an important role in the health of the forest. Foresters have recognized in recent years that decades of policy predicated on fire suppression have allowed for a buildup of fuel that causes more dangerous, destructive fires.
“Fire is essential to our forests,” Harlan said. “Lightning-ignited fires deep in the roadless areas, that’s a place where fire should occur and will occur.”
In March, the SELC — along with Harlan, Kelly and a Sierra Club representative — wrote a letter to the Forest Service, asking it to reconsider logging in roadless areas. It argued that the salvage allowance was breaking the Forest Service’s own rules, including one stating that, on the rare occasions logging takes place in roadless areas, it should only be for small-diameter timber. It asked for more public engagement on the projects and for a meeting to discuss the concerns.
James Melonas, the forest supervisor for the National Forests in North Carolina, sent an email response. He did not address questions about the roadless areas but said the agency had been “fully immersed in emergency response efforts” and would soon “reconvene a broad group of interested partners to discuss ongoing recovery efforts.”
On May 28, the Forest Service did host a “partner update” call, Scheidt said, but it included little discussion. In a Microsoft Teams meeting, Forest Service officials made brief comments about post-Helene recovery and showed a PowerPoint presentation. They also locked Teams’ chat function, muted participants and ended the meeting without taking questions.
‘IS THIS A HARBINGER?’
Already anxious over the expanded logging called for by the Forest Service’s Nantahala-Pisgah Forest Plan, the conservationists said they fear these emergency projects will establish precedents that lead to more opaque operations and more aggressive logging.
Harlan said he worries that roads built in the Dobson Knob area for the salvage project will give the Forest Service access, and an excuse, to stage standard logging projects there in the future. It would fit the direction the Forest Service has taken in loosening protections for old growth forest despite pleas from the public, he said.
“They may be going past the salvage logging and going after intact, mature forest that has no reason to be logged,” he said.
To Kelly, the most alarming aspect of the salvage plan is the shroud of secrecy surrounding it.
“The Forest Service is using the Helene disaster declaration to not do public notification, public outreach, the normal (National Environmental Policy Act) process where they solicit public comment,” he said. “It’s the example of how disaster declarations can be abused, in my opinion. Is this a harbinger of what’s coming with the Trump administration?”
The lack of public involvement is particularly puzzling, Scheidt said, given that the Forest Service spent many months putting these projects together. Internal emails show officials were starting to plan salvage sales as early as Nov. 7. By Christmas, they had finalized a list of salvage project areas. In a December email to Forest Service colleagues, Brown, the timber contracting officer, acknowledged that the downed trees would remain usable for many months, possibly longer.
“We sold timber from (Hurricane) Katrina for a year and a half,” she wrote.
The Forest Service has not issued an update on the salvage projects since May 20, when it posted its update in response to The Watchdog’s inquiries. According to that update, it had sold a half-dozen projects at bid. A seventh project, at Iron Mountain, was sold directly to a buyer after nobody bid on it during the advertising period, and an eighth, at Shope Creek, was sold directly “to minimize mobilization costs.” Two other projects, including Dobson Knob, hadn’t received any bids and had not been sold.
In the absence of completed contracts, Scheidt said, the little that can be gleaned about these projects comes from draft contracts and Forest Service emails. Internal communications show that the agency was planning to repair roads to make access easier for logging crews. The draft contracts list the base rates for timber at the federal regulatory minimum.
“They’re charging the bargain basement price for this timber,” Scheidt said.
It’s not clear how much salvage logging has already happened in the Pisgah. Asked for an update, Rondeau only offered that the Forest Service hadn’t conducted any additional sales since May 20. But at least one project was underway by May 22, when a post on the Appalachian Trail Conservancy’s website advised hikers that they’d still have to detour around the Iron Mountain section.
“The storm debris removal project on the closed section of the A.T. at Iron Mountain Gap is ongoing,” the update read. “The heavy equipment being used for the project is extremely dangerous.
(Asheville Watchdog is a nonprofit news team producing stories that matter to Asheville and Buncombe County. Jack Evans is an investigative reporter who previously worked at the Tampa Bay Times. You can reach him via email at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. The Watchdog’s reporting is made possible by donations from the community. To show your support for this vital public service go to avlwatchdog.org/support-our-publication.)
