When the Forest Service approved the sale of nearly 70 acres for commercial logging in the Shawnee National Forest in southern Illinois in late 2024, Sam Stearns was furious. The Shawnee is the only national forest in the state and one of the smallest in the country. The agency initially presented the so-called McCormick oak and hickory timber restoration project as a forest “thinning” operation to remove older trees to make room for new seedlings. Logging contributes to habitat loss, and Stearns felt the Forest Service was not condoning it.
“Never in the history of this planet has a forest been cleared and healthy again,” Stearns, 71, said.
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Stearns, founder of the conservation group Friends of Bell Smith Spring, planned to oppose the sale. He began following the agency's public comment period, which gave residents like him a chance to voice their concerns. For months, he and other local environmentalists scoured the Internet and local newspapers for mentions of the sale to prepare for the comment period, but McCormick's project never materialized.
It turned out that the Forest Service had advertised the project under a completely different name. The sale was called “V-Plow,” and by the time advocates realized it, a week had passed in the three-week comment period on the project. Previously, advocates said comment periods on logging issues lasted up to 45 days. Court documents later revealed that the agency did not initially receive any proposals. It eventually entered into a contract with an interested buyer in Kentucky in June 2025.
The following month, Stearns and other environmentalists sued the agency to block the plan. They cited the presence of endangered bats and potential impacts to a nearby national natural landmark and said the Forest Service violated the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). Earlier this fall, a federal judge temporarily blocked the project before allowing logging to proceed. The case is still pending, and a Forest Service spokesman declined to comment due to ongoing litigation.
The legal battle is part of a broader conflict between fast-track projects and securing environmental reviews as required by federal law. NEPA requires federal agencies to consider the environmental impacts of projects, but it includes a provision for “categorical exceptions” that allow agencies to bypass full reviews and limit public participation for non-essential proposals.
“It can be a legitimate process, such as when it is used for routine tasks where the impacts are minimal and well known, such as campground or trail maintenance,” said Garrett Rose, senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council. “Unfortunately, the current administration is working to aggressively expand the exemptions available to [the Forest Service]and minimize disclosure of categorically excluded projects.”
In 2023, the Biden administration attempt use these labels to speed up permitting for projects such as renewable energy and broadband internet. Earlier this year, President Donald Trump began pressuring the Forest Service to speed up timber harvesting on public lands. One manager orderHe directed the Forest Service to adopt categorical exceptions developed by other agencies to “reduce unnecessarily lengthy processes.” That means, for example, the Forest Service could use categorical exemptions developed by the Agriculture Department's rural development agency for wastewater treatment plants or power lines, Rose said. The order also directed the Forest Service to develop new exemptions for “thinning” projects related to wildfire mitigation.
Advocates fear the agency is using categorical exclusions more broadly than before to register projects under Trump's directive. Local watchdog groups across the country are working hard to ensure the public has a chance to have input when logging and oil and gas development are approved on public lands.
Ryan Talbott, a conservationist with Wildearth Guardians in the Pacific Northwest, said the Forest Service recently cited categorical exemptions developed by the Tennessee Valley Authority for approving a logging project in the Mount Hood National Forest, which exempts it from the standard strict public comment process. The agency also used the same categorical exception to advance a project in Alaska's Tongass National Forest.
“This all goes back to Trump’s forest executive order,” Talbott said. “They are looking at every possible way to speed up wood production.”
In Indiana, environmentalists recently won a rare victory over the Forest Service. In September, a federal judge stopped a logging project in the Hoosier National Forest, siding with local advocates who argued the agency's plan violated NEPA. The ruling found that the Forest Service did not adequately evaluate the environmental impacts of a proposal to log 4,000 acres and log another 4,000, among other actions, on Indiana's only national forest.
However, Stearns' lawsuit is still ongoing in Illinois. A Kentucky logging crew harvested about half of the nearly 70-acre timber it sold in late August before temporarily stopping work in early September due to Stearns' lawsuit. The loggers haven't finished their work yet.
Standing far from logged hillsides in late November, Stearns said the Forest Service is bad at a lot of things, but they're good at one thing: cutting down trees.
“Even if they got a higher price for this wood, which I know they don’t, these trees would be far more valuable in contributing to the health of the ecosystem than ever felled in this way,” he said.
Editor's note: The Natural Resources Defense Council is a Grist advertiser. Advertisers have no role in Grist's editorial decisions.
