Driving into the Black Hills National Forest, as the road gains elevation, raindrops hitting the windshield slow down and start swirling in the air. It’s snowing in late April, a welcome sight in an area that’s been in a climate change-linked drought. 

Today, most visitors to the Black Hills will still see lots of big trees that are intentionally left standing by the highways — the “yellowbarks,” trunks lightened by age, standing guard like the buttresses of a cathedral. The Forest Service calls this “scenic integrity”; detractors call it a “green screen.” 

That’s because if you pull off on side roads, you’ll soon come to wide plots of land that have been commercially logged. Whitetail deer are running freely; the landscape looks more like a field with a few trees than a forest with a few stumps. Invasive grassland species are creeping in, like bromegrass grass, leafy spurge, spotted knapweed, tansy, and Canada thistle.

Ponderosa pines, the dominant trees here, produce their most viable seeds when they are 60 years or older. That means overcutting, combined with climate change, can permanently change the landscape. In recent decades, the 1.5 million acres of forest sprawling across western South Dakota and eastern Wyoming have weathered a historic beetle infestation and a giant fire, both tied to a warming climate. 

Now the land faces more threats from the Trump administration. Foresters are seeing their jobs cut as the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, lays off federal workers; an executive order on March 1 ordered “immediate expansion” of timber production; and most recently, in April, came a USDA “emergency” directive to fast-track logging on nearly 60 percent of the Black Hills.

While “climate change” is a forbidden term in the Trump administration, wildfire risk reduction is one of the cited reasons behind the USDA order, with the directive designating almost half the Black Hills National Forest as being under “emergency” wildfire risk levels. This authorizes increased removal of trees. The memo also calls to “streamline, to the extent allowable by law, all processes related to timber production,” such as environmental review. Finally, the USDA has said the Forest Service will “issue new or updated guidance to increase timber production.” South Dakota’s congressional delegation, led by Senate Majority Leader John Thune, has been pushing for more logging too.    

Groups like NRDC and NDN Collective, a national Indigenous-rights nonprofit based in the Black Hills, call the directive a hastily constructed disaster. They claim that it mislabels millions of forest acres nationwide, including land that falls within reservation boundaries in many states. It also threatens at least 25 different endangered species nationwide, like the gray wolf, which has been spotted in the Black Hills, while potentially reducing the carbon storage capacity of the forest. 

The directive also conflicts with a memorandum of understanding signed here just last year between the Forest Service and eight tribal nations of the Oceti Sakowin Oyate, which called for cooperative planning on forest management on issues ranging from climate protection and remediation to workforce development and the protection of cultural resources and sacred sites. 

“It’s absolutely completely a U-turn,” says Taylor Gunhammer, a member of the Oglala Lakota Nation and a local environmental organizer with NDN Collective. 

The timber industry is cheering. “The Intermountain Forest Association applauds the recent Executive Order and Secretarial Memo,” said Ben Wudtke of that trade association. “As an industry, we care deeply about the management and sustainability of forests and are proud to play a role in that process.” 

Yet there’s a big irony: Trump’s push is unlikely to greatly increase timber production. The reason is simple: “We don’t have that many big trees left,” said Dave Mertz, who retired from the U.S. Forest Service in 2017 after 32 years and has since evolved into a conservationist.

The Lakota named the area Pahá Sápa — ”hills that are black” — for the looming, dark ponderosa pines that have been recorded to live as long as 700 years. When the Lakota and other tribes stewarded the land, they used controlled burns to clear underbrush and manage bison habitat. “Fire is natural, and the colonial mindset that it should adjust to human activity instead of the other way around is not correct,” said Gunhammer. 

In the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, the United States designated Pahá Sápa as “unceded Indian Territory” exclusively for use by Indigenous peoples. Just six years later General George Armstrong Custer violated the treaty and broke the law by leading an expedition into the Black Hills that spread true but exaggerated rumors of gold. Within the next quarter-century, white settlers, gold prospectors and miners followed Custer, breaking federal law in search of the metal and cutting down three-fourths of the standing trees. 

The free-for-all came to an end in 1899 when Gifford Pinchot, the first chief of the Forest Service, negotiated the first regulated and contracted sale of timber from a national forest. 

Homestake, the first mining company listed on the New York Stock Exchange, sought to preserve its access to timber, which it needed in large quantities for the insides of its mining shafts. To do so, it pushed Pinchot for regulated transactions to guard the resource from smaller “wildcatters” who were their would-be competitors. “It was one of those deals with the big boys in the smoky room,” said Mary Zimmerman of The Norbeck Society, a volunteer conservation group.

Homestake bought 14 million board feet — a unit of measurement used by the logging industry — on approximately 1,700 acres in the Black Hills, in a transaction known as Case No.1. Some of the heartwood of the original stumps from that cut can be seen today, gnarled and gray. 

Since Case No. 1, selling timber has been part of the U.S. Forest Service’s job. The money goes to pay for forest maintenance, and logging companies also sometimes provide services like underbrush clearing in trade. 

Foresters set an annual overall quota. They mark boundaries of specific “sales areas” on a map that look like big squares cut from the forest. Then they do an environmental review before the timber company can go in and cut. 

Trees above nine inches in diameter are the main marketable product. Between five and nine inches, they’re good for maybe wood chips or fence posts. Below five inches, it’s “dog hair,” commercially worthless. Sometimes foresters mark specific large trees to be cut, leaving others alone to maintain a certain density. Other times it’s complete removal, taking every big enough and tall enough tree off the land. 

“I was as aggressive at putting together timber sales as anybody. I didn’t feel guilty about it because I thought I was doing the right thing,” said Dave Mertz, the ex-forester.

During the Great Depression, 30,000 members of the Civilian Conservation Corps both thinned and replanted trees cut by settlers before regulations came into effect. In at least one case, they planted a non-native tree species on 10,000 acres, which became a safety threat and fire risk.

The volume of timber grew far above historic levels thanks to decades of total fire suppression that followed — as thick as a “shag carpet,” says Zimmerman. The density made the timber industry happy but ultimately made the forest more vulnerable. 

Right on cue, bugs and fire arrived. In 2000, the Jasper Fire claimed 83,508 acres. It was big and hot enough to form its own pyrocumulus clouds, which can form over volcanic eruptions and cause lightning storms.

A mountain pine beetle infestation between the mid-1990s and the mid-2010s eventually impacted 435,000 acres of the 1.5 million acres of forest. “I was standing under one of our trees as it was being attacked, and it sounded like a rain stick as they all flew in,” Zimmerman said. The beetle plague was directly linked both to the forest’s unnatural density and to climate change, since larvae will die off when the temperature stays at least 30 degrees below zero for at least five days.

The bugs were great news for loggers. Companies aggressively thinned stands of healthy trees to prevent spread. Foresters called it “beetlemania.” Timber production peaked in 2010. 

But since then it’s been dropping. Foresters and conservationists say it’s because the big, easy easy-to-get trees are just gone.

In 2023 the Black Hills National Forest undertook an intensive Light Detection and Ranging, or LiDAR, project, flying over to map the land at public expense. “This forest probably has more data on it than any in the world,” said Zimmerman. Preliminary results show just what previous surveys have: that marketable trees remaining are few, far between, and small, averaging just over the minimum to be considered sawtimber at all. The remaining big trees are often on steep, rocky slopes, which require special, expensive equipment that might make it uneconomic to log them.

Neiman Enterprises, the biggest timber company in the area, closed one of its South Dakota sawmills in 2021 and laid off workers from the other one last year.  

Loggers are also having to cover more area than they used to. Case No. 1, back in 1899, produced 1,500-1,600 cubic feet per acre, but recent sales were just 400 cubic feet an acre. Expanding sales areas mean carving out more logging roads, more disturbance of the soil and plant and animal species, and logging new, harder to reach and less productive areas. But still, in 2024, production was at a quarter of the peak, and well under the quota. 

Yet the timber industry insists there are still more trees to cut than the Forest Service is allowing. Ben Wudtke, of the Intermountain Forest Association, provides data suggesting that the “standing live volume” of trees in the forest is high. Zimmerman and Mertz argue his numbers don’t account for the diameter of those trees. 

“It’s almost like they’re flat-earthers,” said Mertz. 

The Forest Service did not respond to requests for comment.

The forest now under threat doesn’t belong to the timber industry nor to the federal government. The Lakota won a 1980 Supreme Court case recognizing the theft of this unceded land. The court granted monetary damages, which now amount, with interest, to around $2 billion, but the nation hasn’t touched the money, instead insisting the government return the land. The United Nations also advocates for the U.S. to respect Indigenous rights to the land. “All the Sioux tribes have informed the United States since 1980 that ‘The Black Hills Are Not For Sale,’” Oglala Sioux Tribal President Frank Star Comes Out told the media in April of this year. 

For Lakota people, a just future is clear: to bring all this land back under Indigenous stewardship, not just because of their legal standing, but because of their centuries of experience managing the forest. Around the world, landback and comanagement agreements have been at the forefront of conservation efforts. 

In February 2021, several officials of the Oglala Sioux cosigned a letter with the Norbeck Society and other conservation groups to the Forest Service calling for less logging. “Due to past overharvesting and other factors, there are not enough trees left” to meet the timber industry’s allowed quota, they wrote. That winter, tribal leaders from 12 Great Plains Nations argued for the return and protection of the Black Hills in a two-hour closed-door meeting that tribal leaders called “unprecedented” and “historic,” with Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, the first Indigenous cabinet member. That meeting seemed to bear some fruit toward the end of Biden’s term when Haaland signed a 20-year ban on mining in a portion of the Black Hills. 

Two weeks later, Donald Trump took office. Now what Gunhammer called the “U-turn” has begun. Not long after Trump’s Executive Order on forests, two “exploratory” drilling projects were proposed in a different part of the Black Hills for graphite and uranium mines. The proposed graphite project would impact a place called Pe’ Sla, a mountain meadow and religious area that Gunhammer compares to Mount Sinai or the Vatican.

A single slope of this forest holds the mark of untold centuries. The biggest trees overhead may have sprouted before the Treaty of Fort Laramie was signed. The unassuming tufts of chartreuse lichen underfoot — Letharia vulpina​, the wolf poisoner — can live thousands of years. 

“Our lifetime is shorter than the life of a forest,” says Zimmerman. “It’s spoken of as a renewable resource, but it’s such a long-term thing that in some ways, it’s not.”