Northwest timber operators cite fuel, labor and infrastructure constraints

Several national environmental groups signal plans to sue after formal repeal

Sean Smith of Starfire Lumber and Jeff Brink of Brink Land Development say an anticipated repeal of the Roadless Rule will not resolve record diesel prices, rising equipment costs, worker shortages, inadequate forest infrastructure or a shrinking federal timber market. The rule has largely blocked new road building and logging projects on some 44 million acres of undeveloped national forests since 2001, and formal repeal is expected by early next year. NPR’s Oct. 26 reporting from Cottage Grove and Eugene, Oregon, found support for ending the restriction alongside doubts about whether it could restore the timber industry.

Sean Smith, CEO of the family-owned Starfire Lumber in Cottage Grove, supports the reversal. Smith said he is not saying the executive orders are useless and that they set the tone. He said record diesel prices and inflation are raising the cost of sawblades, ball bearings and other inputs. “We have to buy a million different parts to keep this mouse trap going,” Smith said. Economists cited by NPR largely blamed the record diesel price on Trump’s war with Iran, while inflation was driving up the cost of nearly everything the industry buys.

Smith said repealing the rule was lower on his priority list, though he expected it eventually to provide industry with a more reliable local timber supply. He said much of the nearby Willamette National Forest is dangerously overgrown, whether or not it has roads, and that the built-up fuel makes those forests more prone to catastrophic wildfires. His support was not about obtaining more cheap timber volume. “This is a guy who lives here and is tired of seeing these beautiful places burn up,” he said.

Jeff Brink, a second-generation logger near Eugene, said attracting workers has become difficult because log trucks may operate at 2 a.m. for pay comparable to work at McDonald’s. Brink said labor shortages and high diesel prices could be the tipping point for smaller, less-established loggers already operating on low margins. “For an industry already operating on low margins, this is a tough one,” he said.

His father and uncles started Brink Land Development in 1981, but he said the industry is a fraction of what it was then. Brink said the company is getting by, for now, through a steady stream of forest-restoration projects on private land and some recent salvage-logging timber sales from nearby wildfire burn scars. He said the infrastructure is not in place for the forest work that needs to be done, let alone for a promised timber boom.

Brink said rural Oregon is struggling and all the mills that are not along the I-5 corridor or near urban centers that can source wood are closing. Since the 1990s, an estimated 400 mills across the broader Northwest have closed, amounting to about 35,000 lost jobs; seven mills have closed in Oregon since 2024 alone. “We’re in an industry that for decades has been in a state of contraction,” Brink said.

Timber sales on U.S. federal land dropped by close to 90% since the 1990s, NPR reported, citing tightening environmental laws and other market forces, including cheaper Canadian lumber imports. Industry experts project that overturning the Roadless Rule could increase federal timber sales by 5% to 10%. That estimate has done little to lift enthusiasm in the timber towns NPR visited.

President Trump is widely expected to soon open some 44 million acres of what NPR described as the country’s last pristine national forests. Trump says the move will bring timber jobs back to struggling small towns and help prevent wildfires in overgrown lands, and he has said a timber boom is coming. He signaled the policy shift with executive actions last year aimed at dramatically boosting timber sales on U.S. Forest Service land and reversing the agency’s 25-year-old Roadless Rule.

The administration, timber industry and some local officials are pushing for repeal, saying it will give the Forest Service more flexibility to conduct wildfire prevention, including tree thinning, on land that has largely functioned as wilderness since 2001. Under recent Republican and Democratic administrations, the Forest Service has struggled to carry out projects on forests that already have roads. Lawsuits, red tape and a shortage of workers remain ongoing challenges.

Several national environmental groups have signaled plans to sue once the administration formally repeals the rule, which is expected by early next year. Some opponents also fear a revival of the earlier Timber Wars conflict.

Timothy Ingalsbee, a retired Forest Service firefighter who runs a national firefighter safety and advocacy group, rejects that rationale. He helped lead a year-long tree sit and blockade near Forest Service Road 2408 against an old-growth timber sale in the 1990s. Looking back on the earlier conflict, Ingalsbee said the industry was “headed for a crash” because it had exhausted the supply. He said many of the towering old-growth trees he visited have since burned in recent wildfires.

Ingalsbee called the claim that new road building and logging in roadless areas on behalf of wildland firefighters would make firefighting more efficient “just a big lie.” He added, “Not in our name you don’t.” He fears that adding more roads will lead to more human-caused wildfires, which he said have been rising steadily for decades, and he does not think the policy is really about wildfire prevention or creating more logging jobs.

He said the administration’s public-lands orders are driven more by ideology than real economic demand and said he does not hear industry clamoring for the change. Ingalsbee also accused the U.S. government of racing to open as much of the West as possible so industry could extract maximum profits from timber, oil and coal.

NPR reported that almost everyone on the ground in the Northwest agrees Congress has largely failed to act either to protect federal forests or open them to more development. President Clinton signed the Roadless Rule by executive order at the end of his second term, when Republicans controlled both the Senate and the U.S. House and appetite for passing wilderness legislation was slim. The rule came from a sweeping Forest Service land inventory that marked certain forests as prime acreage for wilderness protection. Congress never codified it, and NPR characterized the administrative rule as “an environmental flashpoint in a polarized country.”

NPR reported broad fatigue among people on the ground in the Northwest over federal forest and timber policy shifting, or “whipsawing,” from one presidential administration to the next. Smith said he was tired of the changes. He said his “cynical side” sometimes wonders whether a do-nothing Congress could be preferable because it would at least avoid causing damage, but he added that this is “no way to run a country long term.” He also said the shifting policy environment makes it hard to keep a business going.