The Chattooga Conservancy and Southern Environmental Law Center filed suit against the US Forest Service on Friday to potentially stop the elimination of safeguards that protect public lands from additional logging, road building and right of way projects.
The US Forest Service – under orders from President Donald Trump to sell more publicly owned forests for lumber – recently finalized a rule that the SELC says would reduce or eliminate transparency, public input, and science-based review from many of the agency’s environmentally consequential decisions.
The changes are part of an overhaul launched by the Trump administration of the National Environmental Policy Act. Both the Nantahala and Pisgah National Forests would potentially be impacted by the changes to NEPA, according to Chattooga Conservancy Executive Director Nicole Hayler.
“This new rule is built on the flawed notion that the bureaucracy of the U.S. Forest Service is the only group that knows what’s best for our forests and watersheds,” Hayler said. “That wrongly discounts the decades of experience citizens like me, and those I work with, have amassed and bring to bear when faced with challenges. We have a long history of rolling up our sleeves to help craft the best management practices for our watershed, and this rule seeks to cut out folks like us from the process. It is the height of hubris and arrogance.”
NEPA ensures that the people most affected by government actions, like road building, will have prior notice and an opportunity to raise concerns and offer alternatives. The Trump administration rewrote NEPA in 2020 and downgraded those safeguards to benefit industry, according to SELC National Forest and Parks Program Director Sam Evans.
“In short, the Forest Service’s new rule allows more commercial exploitation with less public accountability, and that’s a terrible shift in balance,” said Evans. “National forests, and especially those in the Southern Appalachians, are resources for everybody. But the Trump administration wants to give logging lobbyists louder voices than the rest of us.”
According to Evans, the US Forest Service’s rule would restrict opportunities for the kind of public review that communities have depended on for decades to speak up for places they care about.
Public involvement has protected thousands of acres of old-growth forests, backcountry areas, rare habitats and clean waters. Under the new rule, that public oversight would be lost for nearly all logging projects in the Southern Appalachian forests of Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina and Georgia.
The Southern Environmental Law Center is representing The Clinch Coalition, Alliance for the Shenandoah Valley, Chattooga Conservancy, Cherokee Forest Voices, Defenders of Wildlife, Georgia ForestWatch, MountainTrue, Virginia Wilderness Committee, and Wild Virginia in challenging the new Forest Service rule.
“The lawsuit that was filed on Friday was done at that time because the new rule was imposed by the current administration,” Hayler said. “The rule in question was subject to public comment and those comments from people across Western North Carolina and North Georgia will be heard. I would encourage citizens who are interested in the protection of their National Forests not to be disheartened, but to remain engaged and continue to speak out against any measures that could take away their input from the rule making process.”
In a separate court filing, the SELC has already challenged the Trump administration’s changes to NEPA.