New protections for very old trees: The rules cover a huge swath of the US

The nation's oldest trees are getting new protections under a Biden administration initiative to make it harder to cut down old-growth forests for lumber.

The news has implications for climate change and the planet: Forests lock up carbon dioxide, helping reduce the impacts of climate change. That's in addition to providing habitat for wild animals, filtering drinking water sources and offering an unmatched historical connection.

Announced Tuesday, the initiative covers about 32 million acres of old growth and 80 million acres of mature forest nationally ‒ a land area a little larger than California.

“The administration has rightly recognized that protecting America's mature and old-growth trees and forests must be a core part of America's conservation vision and playbook to combat the climate crisis,” Garett Rose, senior attorney at Natural Resources Defense Council said in a statement.

What trees are being protected?

Most of the biggest stretches of old-growth forests in the United States are in California and the Pacific Northwest, along with Alaska, although this initiative also covers many smaller forests on the East Coast where trees may be only a few hundred years old. Old-growth sequoias and bristlecone pines in the West can be well over 2,000 years old.

Environmental activists have identified federally owned old and mature-growth forest areas about the size of Phoenix that are proposed for logging, from portions of the Green Mountain Forest in Vermont to the Evans Creek Project in Oregon, where officials are proposing to decertify almost 1,000 acres of spotted owl habitat to permit logging. The Biden plan tightens the approval process for logging old and mature forests, and proposes creating plans to restore and protect those area.

The forests targeted in the new Biden order are managed by the U.S. Forest Service, separate from other initiatives to protect similar forests overseen by the Bureau of Land Management.

US has long history of logging

European settlers colonizing North America found a landscape largely untouched by timber harvesting, and they heavily logged the land to build cities and railroads, power industries and float a Navy.

In the late 1800s, federal officials began more actively managing the nation's forests to help protect water sources and provide timber harvests, and later expanded that mission to help protect federal forests from over-cutting. And while more than half of the nation's forests are privately owned, they're also among the youngest, in comparison to federally protected old-growth and mature forests.

Logging jobs once powered the economies of many states but environmental restrictions have weakened the industry as regulators sought to protect wildlife and the natural environment. Old-growth timber is valuable because it can take less work to harvest and turn into large boards, which are themselves more valuable because they can be larger and stronger.

“Our ancient forests are some of the most powerful resources we have for taking on the climate crisis and preserving ecosystems,” Sierra Club forests campaign manager Alex Craven said in a statement. “We’re pleased to see that the Biden administration continues to embrace forest conservation as the critical opportunity that it is."