In Western North Carolina, a trivial run to the local Walmart is underscored by scenes better fit for a National Geographic cover shoot. The dreamy, isoprene-induced haze effused by the Blue Ridge Parkway’s stoic oaks alone is enough to turn any insect-averse cubicle dweller into an avid nature enthusiast — but today’s generations might be the last to experience it.
Unsurprisingly, the United States’ current presidential administration has solidified itself as the enemy of all things green and life-sustaining. Thanks to President Donald Trump and his VIP fan club masquerading as a cabinet, the fate of Western North Carolina’s sprawling forests is teetering upon a flimsy stack of environmental policy rollbacks.
In 2023, the U.S. Forest Service published a destructive plan designed to quintuple logging practices in some of North Carolina’s most popular and biodiverse public lands. Since its introduction, the Nantahala and Pisgah Forest Plan has been a subject of public outrage, inspiring significant journalistic and legal retaliation from across the country.
In September 2024, Hurricane Helene ripped apart the mountains, forests and communities of Western North Carolina in a series of unpredictable and permanent ways. With its devastating winds, rain and subsequent floods, approximately 200,000 acres of vegetation in North Carolinian forests were lost to the storm. Despite this loss, the Nantahala and Pisgah Forest Plan is expected to continue.
Because of the five-fold increase of logging in the Pisgah and Nantahala national forests, old growth trees, delicate species habitats and remote backcountry will be destroyed for the sake of commercial activity on a catastrophic scale. Coupled with posthurricane deforestation, 15 years from now, Western North Carolina’s forests might more closely resemble the back of Trump’s head than a thriving hub of biodiversity and public recreation.
The Nantahala and Pisgah Forest Plan serves as an important predecessor for the attitude the current administration has adopted toward environmental values. While it may have been finalized prior to his second presidency, Trump doubled down on the invasive outline following his January inauguration and has only accelerated plans for domestic logging since.
On March 28, the U.S. Department of Agriculture released a detailed map disclosing the areas that Trump’s new “Immediate Expansion of American Timber Production” executive order affects. The wildly irresponsible order rendered over 100 million acres of forested land across the country eligible for logging, circumventing vital conservation measures, like the Endangered Species Act, in favor of logging profits.
In tandem with the Nantahala and Pisgah Forest Plan, the map highlights significant swaths of the Nantahala and Pisgah national forests as areas of interest for the logging expansion initiative. It cites job opportunities and vague claims of wildfire management as reasons for its expedited and dramatic nature.
Other notable regions featured on the map include Northern California, Western Montana, Western Colorado and Northern Washington.
Considerable portions of Western North Carolina’s rolling forested slopes have been designated as an all-you-can-chop buffet for profithungry figures in the timber industry and U.S. politics. If this harrowing reality wasn’t relentless enough, broader blows to already inadequate environmental policies in the U.S. have also shown no abatement.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act remains perhaps the White House’s most sweeping attack on natural resources to date. Besides serving as an accurate representation of its proponents’ literary comprehension abilities, the act effectively guts clean energy initiatives and pollution reduction programs and calls for massive increases in subsidies for oil and gas corporations.
The latest target of the Trump administration’s anti-environmental rampage is the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule. Prohibiting road construction and timber harvests on nearly 60 million acres of national forests and grasslands, the rule has been under active threat of official termination since June 2025.
In the face of projected logging efforts and federal actions, like the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and the Roadless Rule’s rescission, the future of Western North Carolina’s public lands looks awfully bleak. Public land in the U.S. as a whole is in severe jeopardy.
Though these harsh circumstances expose the considerable shortcomings of hyper-commercialized logging, that doesn’t mean logging as a practice altogether is a gross violation of public lands. Through former President William McKinley’s Organic Act of 1897, national forests were founded partially for the purpose of sustaining U.S. domestic timber production. However, the rate of deforestation projected for North Carolina’s national forests is not in favor of long-term conservation or sustainment of the timber industry. Informed by a time perspective akin to that of a preschooler, its goal is very simple: to maximize profits as quickly as possible.
The threat the U.S. government poses to public lands is larger than concerns of not being able to witness the same scattered, fiery blooms of an Appalachian autumn again. It’s larger than the U.S. government itself.
Anyone who reaps the benefits of outdoor recreation, irreplaceable species habitat, breathable air, drinkable water and a livable climate must take a stand against the daily choice the wealthy elite make to sacrifice the planet for flagrant financial gain.
Whether it be a Chimney Rock resident still navigating the aftermath of Helene, an App State student living in Boone or a tourist visiting the Nantahala National Forest for the first time, everyone who understands the impending ecological plight of Western North Carolina and the greater U.S. has a right to fight it — passionately and unapologetically.
Lawsuits are being filed. Petitions are being signed. Protests are springing up everywhere. Despite criminally inadequate political media coverage, opportunities for resistance are as increasingly ubiquitous as the abuses of federal power they oppose.
The earth is not a piggy bank for the liver-spotted hands of fascist fossils like Trump to crack open and ravage. It is life itself — and when life is threatened, its beholders have an obligation to protect it.
Trees are worth being spoken for.
