The Center for Biological Diversity and MountainTrue are suing the federal government, seeking to ensure laws are followed where they claim the U.S. Forest Service is skirting regulations in allowing the logging of a 135-acre parcel in the Nolichucky Gorge near the small Poplar community on the border between Yancey and Mitchell counties. 

This coverage is made possible through a partnership between BPR and Grist, a nonprofit environmental media organization.

Nearly one month into the federal government shutdown, the Great Smoky Mountains National Park remains open to the public, and the National Forest Service’s logging and disaster response capabilities remain active. 

The National Forest Service, housed under the United States Department of Agriculture, plans to rescind the 2001 Roadless Rule instated by President Bill Clinton to protect national forests’ roadless acres. 

Drawing opposition from 99% of public commenters, this recission is part of a series of opaque federal actions and policies instituted in the face of significant public outcry. 

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.

A lawsuit filed last month in a Washington, D.C., federal court alleges the U.S. Forest Service’s practice of setting “timber targets” puts the climate at risk, undermines the Biden administration’s climate goals and violates federal law. 

In a newly filed lawsuit, a coalition of conservation organizations is alleging that a controversial U.S. Forest Service logging project on the Cashiers-Highlands Plateau violates federal law. 

The Pisgah and Nantahala national forests are now operating under a new management plan, ending an arduous, 11-year process to revise an existing plan implemented in 1987.

Five years after it first proposed the controversial Southside Timber Project, the U.S. Forest Service has awarded a timber bid to cut the first 98 acres of 317 acres to be harvested — earning sharp criticism from environmental groups who say the project will destroy rare old-growth forest. 

A decade of meetings, hearings, comments, debate and disagreement over the future of the Pisgah and Nantahala national forests culminated in a three-day meeting marathon last week that aimed to resolve hundreds of objections over the plan’s handling of everything from old growth to drinking water.

More than 300 people gathered outside the U.S. Forest Service headquarters in Asheville Monday, Aug. 1, to urge stronger protections for the Pisgah-Nantahala National Forest as the Forest Service finalizes the plan to guide forest management for the next two decades.