How Trump’s timber order impacts Western forests, including those in Arizona

FLAGSTAFF, AZ (AZFamily) — President Trump is looking to increase logging and timber production across the country by 25%. Some conservation groups worry about the environmental impacts, while others say this is needed to get ahead in the fight against wildfires.

Coconino County is surrounded by forests, including the largest continuous ponderosa pine forest in the world. It also comes with increased fire danger. While the federal government is now working to increase logging for economic and fire mitigation reasons, Coconino County has been on that path for years.

Coconino County is no stranger to fires, from the Pipeline Fire to the Schultz Fire, causing hundreds of millions in damages.

Forest restoration director Jay Smith said a lack of forest management has increased fire danger. He said a healthy forest has 30 to 50 trees per acre, but some areas around the county have over 2,000 trees per acre.

“We’ve excluded fire for the last 75 years, and that’s allowed for more trees to grow than what naturally would be here,” Smith said.

So, the county has spent over $7 million since 2019 on forest restoration, such as reducing the number of trees.

Over the past several years, timber mills across the country have been shutting down, but Coconino County opened the largest sawmill in the southwest last year to process the woodcut by the county.

“We’re one of the few areas in the country that’s actually expanding our logging and sawmill industry,” Smith said. “We’re hoping they can do 20,000 acres per year.”

The Trump administration has also been eyeing the timber industry. At the beginning of March, the president signed an executive order to expand the U.S.’s timber production.

U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins issued an emergency declaration at the beginning of April that ordered the Forest Service to allow logging on 112 million acres of national forest.

The administration points to fire mitigation and economic reasons but also rolls back environmental protections.

Conservation groups like the Sierra Club say they’re concerned about environmental repercussions.

“If this administration were serious about the wildfire crisis, it wouldn’t chaotically fire wildfire prevention staff at the behest of Elon Musk,” said Anna Medema, Sierra Club’s associate director of legislative and administrative advocacy for forests and public lands. “It wouldn’t slash departmental budgets and preparedness funds. It wouldn’t condition disaster aid to communities destroyed by wildfire. And it wouldn’t name an industry lobbyist to oversee hundreds of millions of acres of national forests.”

Smith said this will primarily impact the Pacific Northwest, but they’ll watch for clear-cutting and removal of old-growth trees, which they do not want in Coconino forests.

“I still don’t feel too afraid of that being a part of the problem, but we’ll keep an eye on that and watch that. We want to do the right thing for the forest.”

He adds the county wants to increase logging in the future as it’s one of the best ways to decrease fire danger.

“We have several thousand acres, almost a million acres in Coconino County alone that we want to treat,” Smith said.

See a spelling or grammatical error in our story? Please click here to report it.

Do you have a photo or video of a breaking news story? Send it to us here with a brief description.

Copyright 2025 KTVK/KPHO. All rights reserved.