WASHINGTON— President Trump on Saturday signed an executive order aimed at undermining safeguards for endangered wildlife and bypassing other environmental protections to radically increase logging and road building on hundreds of millions of acres of national forests and other public lands.

Federal forests account for about one-third of the forested lands in the United States, and increased logging will wreak havoc on critical wildlife habitat, pollute the water and air, and increase fire risk by destroying older, more fire-resistant trees.

“Trump’s order will unleash the chainsaws and bulldozers on our beautiful, irreplaceable federal forests,” said Randi Spivak, public lands policy director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “Clearcutting these amazing national treasures will increase fire risk, drive imperiled wildlife to extinction, pollute our rivers and streams, and destroy world-class recreation sites.”

The order directs widespread and significant increases in logging and roadbuilding, which will result in harms like:

1. Significant impacts to drinking water: U.S. national forests and grasslands are the largest sources of municipal water supply in the nation, serving more than 60 million people in 33 states. Logging harms water quality, primarily by causing increased soil erosion, which leads to sediment runoff into waterways, polluting water with dirt and debris.
2. Driving wildlife to extinction: Trump’s executive order requires the U.S. Forest Service and Interior Department to use the emergency provisions of the Endangered Species Act Committee to facilitate widespread logging on Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service land. There are more than 400 species protected under the Act that rely on our national forests, including grizzly bears, spotted owls, and wild salmon.
3. Increased wildfire risk: Forests subjected to industrial logging for timber production burn more severely than older and taller forests.

“This is a particularly horrific move by Trump to loot our public lands by handing the keys to the kingdom over to big business,” Spivak said. “We’ll fight it tooth and nail, and the public won’t stand for it.”