Trump’s Forest Service Pressuring Media to Cover Up Public Lands Logging?

-by Josh Schlossberg, Colorado Advocate, Eco-Integrity Alliance

[This opinion piece was sent to multiple media outlets in Colorado, yet each refused to publish it, in effect, media covering up its own cover up.]

As a former member of the media, I’d say we have every reason to worry if meddling from the Trump administration briefly took Jimmy Kimmel off the air. If so, government pressure resulting in media censorship might not only be a violation of the First Amendment but a sign of creeping authoritarianism.

Unfortunately, here in Colorado, evidence suggests we’re experiencing our own version of government twisting the arm of media to censor stories that might make them look bad. In this case, it’s a cover up—intentional or not—of the unprecedented onslaught of aggressive public lands logging by Trump’s U.S. Forest Service.

Other than a handful of opinion pieces, guess how many mentions Colorado media outlets have made of the largest logging sale in state history? I’m talking about the “Lower North South Vegetation Management,” 116,600 acres of logging—including clearcutting, cutting in old-growth and in endangered species habitat—in the Pike National Forest 30 miles southwest of Denver, with 47,000 acres of “treatments” within protected Roadless Areas.

The answer is zero media mentions. As in, not a single line in a single article anywhere in Colorado despite two years of press releases sent to nearly every reporter writing on the environment across the state (not to mention the other gigantic logging project in the Roosevelt National Forest, also in Roadless Areas).

As if a blackout on the most massive forest destruction projects we’ve ever seen wasn’t enough, incredibly, this summer there was a rash of blatant media disinformation claiming that Colorado Roadless Areas are supposedly “safe from Trump’s axe” with not a word about the logging!

It gets worse. Emails obtained through the Colorado Open Records Act (CORA) reveal the Forest Service to be convincing Colorado journalists not to report on past logging projects.

These emails came in response to a local news outlet inquiring about a section of the Roosevelt National Forest in Boulder County “thinned” for “fuel reduction” in 2015. A Forest Service figure from its own study showed this cut patch of forest burned at mostly high-severity in the 2016 Cold Springs fire, while the adjacent uncut forest did not burn at all. This tracks with an abundance of peer-reviewed studies showing “fuel reduction”—the very Trojan Horse being used by Trump to roll back the Roadless Rule—to be ineffective or even counterproductive at protecting communities or reducing high-severity fire (a dubious goal to begin with in fire-adapted ecosystems).

In the emails, the Forest Service made easily disproven false claims about the logging project while defaming scientists and conservationists. Not only did the news outlet abandon the story, it ignored all follow up communications from several conservationists refuting the falsehoods and offering a tour of the logging so reporters could see it for themselves.

As if that’s not bad enough, Trump’s Forest Service—and local taxpayer-funded government agencies such as Boulder and Jefferson County Open Space—appears to be policing media’s language, forbidding them from using accurate terms like “logging,” the dictionary definition being “the activity of cutting down trees in order to use their wood.”

An editor went so far as to censor the forbidden word from a recent opinion piece of mine despite a Forest Service map of the project in question labeled with “ground based logging” and “steep slope logging.”

None of this should be a surprise, since the U.S. Forest Service—housed under the Department of Agriculture…yes, an “agriculture” bureau overseeing our wildest lands—carries out the federal timber sale program. From 2014-2023 the federal agency sold a yearly average of 3 billion board feet from U.S. National Forests, 100.9 million board feet from Colorado National Forests alone in 2020. What was that again about not “logging”?

My question is whether Colorado media outlets are going to stand up against the government and industry censorship keeping them from accurately reporting—or sometimes reporting at all—on the Trump’s administration’s unprecedented onslaught on public lands? Or have they become willing participants in the cover up?

Josh Schlossberg is a Colorado resident living adjacent to the Roosevelt National Forest, award-winning investigative journalist and science writer, and Colorado Advocate for Eco-Integrity Alliance (Eco-IntegrityAlliance.org).