Washington has quietly made logging a part of the state's climate mitigation strategy. The Forest Behind Bruce Anderson’s home in the rolling foothills south of Puget Sound in Washington is densely packed with enormous Douglas fir trees, the most commercially harvested tree species in the United States. It is a natural forest, grown from seeds dispersed by a previous generation of conifers around the time of the Civil War.

AS THE SKY CLEARED over rain-swept Southeast Alaska one August afternoon in 2019, we flew over Prince of Wales Island to take in its lush forests. Numerous fresh clearcuts interrupted the deep green cover on the United States’ fourth largest island located at the southern end of Alaska’s massive Tongass National Forest. In some spots, stands of younger trees stretched their canopies across older, logged areas. On the whole, though, the forest here looked rich and vast.

Starting in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, the Trump administration is proposing to eliminate long-standing rules protecting 50 million acres of ancient forests across the country from logging and roadbuilding, raising new alarms about the president’s disregard for the climate and wildlife. Taxpayers, already spending billions to keep Alaska’s timber industry afloat, could end up paying even more. If Trump strips roadless protection from the Tongass, no National Forest is safe.

Driving up the Pacific Coast Highway from San Francisco, you approach the world’s largest contiguous temperate rainforest. But don’t look for any markers or directions. There aren’t any. In fact, the rainforest, which stretches 2,500 miles from Northern California all the way to Kodiak Island in the Gulf of Alaska – almost as far as the distance as from New York to Los Angeles – doesn’t even have an official name.

Washington has quietly made logging a part of the state's climate mitigation strategy. The Forest Behind Bruce Anderson’s home in the rolling foothills south of Puget Sound in Washington is densely packed with enormous Douglas fir trees, the most commercially harvested tree species in the United States. It is a natural forest, grown from seeds dispersed by a previous generation of conifers around the time of the Civil War.