Two lawsuits filed in November aim to expose the Trump administration’s use of emergencies to log federal forests without fully considering the risks to forests and endangered species, according to the litigation filed by environmental groups.

The US Forest Service used an emergency determination to avoid considering a California logging project’s impact on the imperiled northern spotted owl, according to a lawsuit filed Nov. 25 by the Klamath Forest Alliance and three other groups. In another suit filed Nov. 6, the Forest Service took advantage of a Hurricane Helene cleanup project in North Carolina’s Pisgah National Forest to harvest timber where environmentalists say it isn’t allowed.

The litigation is among 26 suits pending nationwide filed by conservation groups challenging some aspect of federal logging programs, including logging’s harms to endangered species. Environmentalists say the suits represent their alarm at the Trump administration’s escalation of logging on federal lands as it lifts restrictions on road-building in forests and executes emergency orders.

The Trump administration has made prolific use of emergency declarations to advance its priorities, including a Jan. 20 executive order declaring an energy emergency, which promoted fossil fuels and excluded renewables from its definition of “energy.” The Energy Department is using emergency orders to keep power plants using fossil fuels online, sparking lawsuits. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins in April said wildfire risk on federal lands is extreme and declared an emergency to expedite logging to cut the risk and create jobs.

The logging suits are the latest to challenge the use of emergency orders to promote administration priorities.

“To call this an emergency is stretching the bounds,” said Sam Evans, senior attorney for the Southern Environmental Law Center, which represents the plaintiffs in the North Carolina case. “We’re going to see more of that. The elastic on what is an emergency is going to stretch further and further.”

A ‘Test Kitchen’

The case, Mountaintrue v. US Forest Service, filed in US District Court for the Western District of North Carolina, challenges the Forest Service’s decision to proceed with the Poplar timber sale, a “salvage” logging project to clean up trees blown down in the 2024 hurricane. It included logging in a healthy forest without authorization and without public notice, the Center for Biological Diversity and the environmental group Mountaintrue claim in the suit.

The Pisgah forest is “a test kitchen for what we’re going to be seeing more and more of across the country” because the Forest Service used an emergency situation as an opportunity to log areas that weren’t damaged in the storm, Evans said.

The groups misread the emergency declaration, which authorizes logging in the area they’re contesting, the Forest Service said in a response to the groups’ motion for preliminary injunction. The agency said the groups’ lawsuit has no merit, and asked the court to require the groups to post a $64,396 bond to cover the cost of the logging contract if it’s terminated as a result of the litigation.

The Forest Service declined to further comment, but said in an unsigned email that removing downed trees would reduce the threat of wildfire.

A similar situation is playing out in California. In Klamath Forest Alliance v. Jones, filed in US District Court for the Eastern District of California, four environmental groups say the Forest Service approved “emergency” logging outside of a wildfire burn area in the Shasta-Trinity National Forest. The agency is proceeding with timber sales in threatened northern spotted owl habitat before conducting an environmental review of logging there, the suit claims.

“This is the first time that we have seen timber sales being offered prior to any” environmental review—an especially damaging move in a forest with rare pairs of spotted owls that are actively reproducing, said Kimberly Baker, executive director of the Klamath Forest Alliance.

The emergency declaration cuts out the public to proceed with “intensive” commercial logging before considering its effects on the spotted owl, the lawsuit says.

“No bona fide ‘emergency’ circumstances exist in the Project area at present,” the lawsuit says. “Instead, the Forest Service claims as an ‘emergency’ a need to mitigate the threat of a possible future wildfire.”

The Forest Service declined to comment on the California suit.

In North Carolina, environmental groups are closely watching the Pisgah and Nantahala national forests because of a plan to increase logging there by 400%, said Randi Spivak, public lands policy director for the Center for Biological Diversity.

The center is a plaintiff in two other lawsuits in the same court challenging logging in those forests. One suit filed last year, Defenders of Wildlife v. US Forest Service, claims logging there threatens four species of endangered bats. Another suit filed in March, Mountaintrue v. US Forest Service, claims the Forest Service violated the National Environmental Policy Act and other laws when it approved its plan for increased logging.

Logging Push

The Trump administration has taken numerous steps to promote logging on federal lands since taking office in January. Republicans’ sweeping spending bill, which took effect in July, mandates a roughly 75% increase in federal lands logging by 2034. President Donald Trump in March ordered an expansion of timber production, the basis for Rollins’ emergency order.

Both orders cite provisions of the Endangered Species Act that can sidestep concerns about imperiled plants and animals in emergencies. They also promote logging as a way to revive the domestic timber industry and create jobs.

The moves represent a “long-overdue shift” from hands-off forest management to “wise use” of natural resources that doesn’t treat landscapes as museum pieces, said Mark Miller, director of environment and natural resources litigation for the Pacific Legal Foundation, which opposes government overreach.

But the Trump administration’s forest policy is irrational and driven by logging volume targets mismatched with the ecological conditions of the forests and public opinion that supports protecting them, said Chris Winter, an environmental law professor at the University of Colorado Law School.