Facing opposition, feds shape future for popular NC forestland

North Carolina is home to one of the most-visited swaths of national forestland, the Nantahala and Pisgah National Forests. The future of about 450,000 acres of the combined land — nearly half of it — is now in the hands of the U.S. Forest Service after eight years of arguments about the best use of the forests.

Since 2014, the federal agency has been working on a management plan for the future of the land. The plan could be in place for up to 30 years. The forests, which stretch along the state’s western border and include parts of the Appalachian Trail and Blue Ridge Parkway, drive recreational tourism in the 18 counties they touch. But the land is also a key resource for the state’s forestry industry.

The service is now working on a final version of the plan and was expected to release it before the end of last year. Observers of the process now expect the plan to land early this year.

U.S. Forest Service officials repeatedly declined interview requests from WRAL, citing the ongoing feedback process.

The plan includes two components: An outline of the management methods the Forest Service will use in the coming years, and a map that shows where the timber industry will be allowed to bid on projects. It lays out what rules are attached to those areas, like a zoning map.

Groups such as the Southern Environmental Law Center oppose the plan due to the logging allowances. “The ‘how much’ question hasn’t been particularly controversial,” said Sam Evans, SELC’s senior attorney for national forests and parks. “In this plan or vision, it’s really been the ‘where,’ and the ‘why,’ and the ‘how.’”

The most recent plan allowed comparatively little logging, but still resulted in “a tremendous amount of harm” to old-growth forests in state-designated natural areas, as well as sedimentation runoff into headwater streams, Evans said.

“If you’re in a major metropolitan area downstream of the Nantahala-Pisgah, which most of the South is,” he said, “you’re getting some of your drinking water, at least, from these headwater streams.”

The proposed plan would open up even more of those environmentally sensitive areas to logging.

“They’re telling us that there’s no risk, there is no harm,” Evans said. “They haven’t learned their lessons over the last 10 to 20 years, and they’re going to continue doing the same thing except at a faster pace and on a bigger portion of the landscape.”

Logging is among the reasons national forests were even established. And people often confuse national forests with national parks.

National parks are managed by the U.S. Department of the Interior primarily for conservation and recreation. National forests, however, are managed under an entirely different framework within the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

“One of the statutory purposes for having national forests — and this goes back to the very beginning of public lands in the U.S. — is for timber harvest,” Evans said. “It would take an act of Congress to change that.”

In the view of the state’s timber industry, which has also filed objections to the Forest Service’s proposed management plan, the Nantahala-Pisgah forests haven’t been managed properly in years.

John Hatcher, executive director of North Carolina Forestry Association, said the land used to be a major part of western North Carolina’s economy.

“Active forest management was an integral part of our national forests for a long, long time, Hatcher said. “... You go to Murphy, North Carolina, forestry at one point was probably the major employer out in the county. Now it is not, unfortunately.

“The national forests have not been harvesting what they have historically done over the last several decades. And so a lot of businesses, a lot of industries have gone out of business.”

According to N.C. State University’s forestry department, the forest products industry in North Carolina accounted for about $33 billion in direct and indirect economic impact in 2020, and some 138,000 jobs.

Most of the timber currently harvested in the state is grown on private land. Hatcher said the industry has done a good job managing millions of acres of that private land for sustainable growth and continuous annual yields while abiding by protective environmental regulations.

In the Nantahala and Pisgah forests, Hatcher said, the timber industry would likely use a variety of methods, including thinning and clear-cutting in some areas, to harvest trees and restore “early successional” grassland habitat that benefits wild grouse and other wildlife.

“Animal populations have really declined,” he said. “So whether visitors are there to enjoy those from a hunting aspect or just sightseeing, the landscape is essentially suffering in my opinion from a lack of management over the years.”

Hatcher says the forests can easily sustain more logging without harm to the landscape and without conflicting with recreational uses, and he thinks that would actually help protect the forests from wildfires.

“You see the wildfires in the West, Pacific Northwest. And it’s largely due to not being managed properly,” he said. “You've got too much fuel in the ground.

“Sustainable management ensures that you have trees for the future. This is not a practice of just harvesting timber for the sake of deriving a crop and leaving the landscape bare. That’s the furthest thing from the truth.”

Will Harlan is a scientist and conservation advocate at the Center for Biological Diversity, which is based in Asheville. His group, too, has filed objections to the proposed forest plan.

Harlan says his group isn’t asking for the entirety of the forestland to be protected from logging. Instead, it hopes to protect the 45,000 acres of old-growth forest that remain, including habitat for rare and endangered species such as hellbender salamanders.

“This amounts to a very small percentage of the overall forest, but over 70% of the biodiversity would be protected if you just protected the old-growth forests,” Harlan said, adding that the area is home to one of the largest collections of salamander species in the world.

“You have something really special here,” he said.

Harlan said his group and other stakeholders worked for years to come up with a proposed forest plan that would allow more logging while protecting areas important to tourism as well as environmental conservation. Despite the compromise plan’s wide backing, he says the U.S. Forest Service didn’t incorporate their proposals into the plan.

Harlan pointed to Craggy Gardens, a high-elevation scenic area along the Blue Ridge Parkway near Asheville that is popular with photographers.

“The loggers, the hunters, the conservationists, all the recreation groups, the city of Asheville, Buncombe County Commission — every entity has signed on to say, ‘Yeah, this makes sense to protect the 16,000 acres adjacent to the Blue Ridge Parkway, let's protect that viewshed, that watershed,’” Harlan said. “Everyone wants to protect it except for the Forest Service. In this plan, they've completely dismissed the Craggy national scenic area and opened 4,000 acres of it to their highest priority logging.”

Harlan says the Forest Service has relied for too long on receipts from logging to pay its bills. In 2022, he says, it’s time for the agency to emulate the national parks by collecting its revenue from recreational users instead. The Nantahala and Pisgah forests had 7 million visitors in 2021.

“In the country's most popular national forest for recreation, where the Appalachian Trail provides the backbone, where thousands of miles of hiking and biking trails are attracting — millions of visitors, waterfall wonderlands and rare species. This is a global biodiversity hotspot,” Harlan said. “When you put all of those things together, this forest is far more valuable standing than cut down.”

How much would more logging hurt the recreational pull of the Appalachian Trail? Grayson Currin is a journalist who writes about long-distance hiking for national outlets. He hiked the full length of the Appalachian Trail in 2019, as well as other national trails including the Pacific Coast Trail and the Florida Trail.

The Appalachian Trail is by far the most popular long-trek hiking trail in the country. Currin says what sets it apart from the others is “the green tunnel.”

“It's so rare that you can exist for four to six months feeling like you're in a forest, and the Appalachian Trail is one of those places where for the most part, that's how you feel,” Currin told WRAL. “One primary reason people hike the Appalachian Trail is to feel like they’re living in wilderness and communing with these incredible trees for months at a time, and those opportunities are fleeting.”

But Currin isn’t convinced that additional logging in the Nantahala and Pisgah would necessarily diminish that experience.

“I do think the majesty of the Appalachian Trail depends on these forests, but it is somewhat naive or idealistic to think that these forests are intact,” he said.

He pointed out that the trail is managed at various points by various entities, from the National Park Service and National Forest Service to multiple state and local agencies, conservancies and other jurisdictions.

“There is this conception that the AT and all these hiking trails are pure, that they're just majestic from end to end,” he explained. But because there are so many entities managing the trail, he said,the landscape is actually diverse. “You cross power lines all the time. … You're in places that have been logged before and have grown back. You're in places where there's encroaching development.”

Given the popularity of the Appalachian Trail, Currin said he’d be very surprised if the Forest Service doesn’t do what it can to protect it.

“These forests are working forests,” he said. “We have an economy. We have needs. I don't want to be naive about those. But I do think always thinking about balance and thinking about long-term management is crucial. Hopefully, that's what the Forest Service is doing.”