The Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) has filed an appeal on behalf of the Chattooga Conservancy and other conservation plaintiffs, continuing to challenge the U.S. Forest Service (USFS)’s timber targets. Timber targets are yearly quotas for the volume of timber harvested from U.S. national forests. There is strong evidence supporting our claim that these targets drive USFS decision making, leading agency officials to pursue widespread logging without fully analyzing the environmental consequences of their actions.
As top-level decisions that steer agency policy, setting and distributing timber targets should be subject to National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) review, which requires evaluating the environmental effects—including climate impacts—of major agency actions. Instead, USFS waits until timber targets have trickled down into individual, on-the-ground timber sales to evaluate environmental impacts, including carbon emissions from logging. Waiting until a national-level policy is broken down into small pieces before evaluating impacts—so emissions from each individual project then seem like a drop in the ocean—is not only disingenuous, but it also deprives the American public of the opportunity to comment on the national timber-target policy and assess critical data: the total amount of carbon released into the atmosphere from USFS logging across the country.
The process of legal challenge takes time. (Yet another reason the public should be given the opportunity to comment when timber targets are set at the national level.) Our Timber Targets lawsuit has been ongoing since 2024. Since our last Chattooga Currents update, we received an adverse ruling, which failed to qualify setting and distributing timber targets as top-down decisions requiring NEPA review. However, there is substantial evidence supporting the fact that timber targets are, indeed, set at the highest level and handed down the chain. Therefore, SELC appealed the ruling on our timber targets claims in May 2026. The Chattooga Conservancy and our fellow conservation plaintiffs are committed to holding USFS accountable to their duties under U.S. environmental law. We continue to demand that USFS meet their obligations to evaluate the climate effects of their national logging policy. The agency must take a hard look at the impacts of their timber targets and offer an opportunity for the public to weigh in.
Image: Early stages of logging along Double Branch Road in August 2025. This timber sale was part of USFS’s Loblolly Pine Project in the Andrew Pickens Ranger District, SC. Credit: Jasmine Williams