A federal judge ruled that an exemption used by the U.S. Forest Service that allowed it to clear-cut forests was improperly applied.
The decision came after Oregon Wild, WildEarth Guardians, and Green Oregon Alliance sued the USFS in 2022, Inside Climate News reported. It had cited Categorical Exclusion 6, which authorizes logging to lower wildfire risk, for "three commercial tree-thinning projects covering 29,000 acres in southern Oregon's Fremont-Winema National Forest."
ICN noted that the USFS has used CE-6 since the early 2000s to expedite large timber harvests rather than small ones, which environmental groups say is the reason for it, and that would clearly protect communities and wildlife habitats from wildfires.
In this case, Judge Michael McShane of the U.S. District Court of Oregon wrote that it was "arbitrary and capricious … to promulgate CE-6." Under the National Environmental Policy Act, such operations require environmental assessments and impact statements, but these were not conducted for these three projects.
CE-6 is the most widely used categorical exclusion and has been used to justify the clearing of over 3 million acres, according to ICN. The judgment will resonate beyond the Beaver State, though ongoing projects will not be halted.
"The most destructive fires in modern history — the Camp Fire, Marshall Fire, Lahaina, Talent and Phoenix, Paradise — were not stopped by thinning, fuel breaks, highways, or previously treated forests. They were wind-driven ember storms that ignited homes, then turned neighborhoods into fuel," said Ralph Bloemers, executive director of Green Oregon Alliance. "This challenges a rule that was used to support a legacy approach that clearly isn't working."
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There is debate about the merits of forest thinning in preventing wildfires, as ICN detailed. Fire suppression has led to forest overgrowth, and clearing certain vegetation may reduce fire intensity. But large trees like the ones felled via CE-6 "are often more resilient to wildfires."
No matter how you slice it, protecting forests is important as temperatures rise and increase the frequency and severity of extreme weather events, including wildfires. The United States lost 1.4 million hectares (over 3.45 million acres) of forest in 2024 and 18% of its tree cover from 2001 to 2024.
In Montana, the Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration initiative has restored 5.7 million acres of forest. Prescribed fires by the USFS have also lowered high-intensity fires by 64% in California. In Fremont-Winema, there are no towns near the proposed projects, so the need to reduce fire risk with the trio of logging projects was questionable.
Bloemers said the ruling would force "agencies to prove what they claim, analyze what they authorize, and stop treating communities as collateral damage in a logging strategy that was never designed to save them."
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