Not For Sale: Why National Forests Deserve More Than PR Spin

It’s #NationalForestWeek, a time that, on paper, celebrates the beauty and importance of our national forests.

But when the week is framed by the very institutions enabling industrial extraction on public lands, the celebration rings hollow. The National Forest Foundation, closely tied to the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) and industry interests, paints a glossy picture of recreation, clean water, and economic boosts as a nod to observing National Forest Week. But buried in their own language is a troubling truth: these lands are still treated as commodity zones – providers of “timber, minerals, oil and gas” – rather than living ecosystems with rooted value.

At the John Muir Project, our work is about shifting the paradigm. These forests are not here to serve us or the industries that seek to profit from them. Their value goes far beyond recreation, extraction, or utility. They are ancient, interdependent systems that sustain life and deserve protection not because of what they offer, but because of what they are. They are not assets to be optimized. They are wild systems to be appreciated and defended.

Why National Forests Matter (Beyond Recreation & Economy)

National Forests span nearly 200 million acres across the U.S., holding some of the most carbon-rich, biodiverse, and fire-adapted lifeforms on Earth. They are essential carbon sinks, playing a direct role in climate stability. They support countless native species. They host complex, natural fire cycles that, when left uninterrupted by human interference, create resilient landscapes over space and time. And they encompass ancestral homelands and sacred places that deserve protection and respect.

(Let’s be clear: forest disturbances like fire, wind, and drought are natural. But it’s only when we add chainsaws, roads, industrial machinery, and the like that disturbance becomes unnatural; this damage is long-lasting and climate-compounding.)

Too often, these public forests are treated as commodities. In truth, they are ecosystems with their own integrity and intrinsic value, shaped by millions of years of natural processes and millennia of Indigenous stewardship.

Why an Agricultural Framework Fails Our Forests

The U.S. Forest Service, housed within the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), manages National Forests like crops in a field, prioritizing outputs, “products,” and prescribed treatments. The very agency tasked with protecting these forests views them through an agricultural-industrial lens, as working lands meant to yield timber, biomass for dirty energy, livestock forage, and mineral wealth.

This structural placement is not just bureaucratic, it reflects a deep-rooted worldview: that forests exist to serve the economy. That worldview drives policies that treat wildfires as an enemy to suppress, dead and downed trees as waste to be “cleaned up,” and mature forests as underutilized stockpiles of carbon and lumber.

National Forests are not farms. They are dynamic ecosystems that burn, grow, decay, regenerate, and evolve without needing mechanical intervention to do so. Housing them under the USDA reinforces outdated assumptions that forests must be managed to be “healthy,” when in fact, it’s our “management” that so often disrupts their natural cycles and weakens their climate resilience.

Transferring oversight to the National Park Service would not be a cure-all, but it would be a meaningful shift in perspective. It would begin to move us away from the framing of forests as commodities, and toward a stewardship model centered on ecological integrity, Indigenous sovereignty, and long-term preservation.

The Greenwashing of National Forest Week

On the surface, National Forest Week sounds like a celebration of beauty, biodiversity, and access. But dig a little deeper, and you’ll find that much of the language used to promote this week, from “heritage” to “way of life” to “resources for communities,” serves to obscure more than it reveals. It’s a well-crafted PR campaign, co-opted by the very institutions allowing extractive industries to degrade these lands.

This isn’t a fringe conspiracy, it’s baked into the messaging. The National Forest Foundation, which helped create and now promotes National Forest Week, works closely with the Forest Service and partners in the logging industry. Their materials tout the forests’ value in terms of recreation, water, and carbon storage but also as providers of “timber, minerals, oil and gas.” That’s not just flowery language. It’s a signal to industry that these lands are open for business.

What’s missing from this week’s glamorized outreach? Any meaningful acknowledgement of:

• The rampant commercial logging happening under the guise of “restoration” or “fuel reduction,” including widespread logging of mature and old-growth trees, and clearcutting
• The miles of roads being cut through critical habitat
• The fossil fuel leases granted on public land
• The displacement and desecration of Indigenous lands and cultural sites
• The climate consequences of treating carbon-dense forests as a renewable resource to be routinely cut and sold

None of this makes it into the celebratory narrative. Instead, we get filtered images of hikers, campers, and patriotic slogans – divorced from the damage being done just out of frame.

At JMP, we’re not here to dampen people’s love for public lands. We’re here to protect that love from being used as a marketing tool for the very activities that put these places at risk. Taking back the narrative means refusing to accept celebration without scrutiny, and calling out greenwashing when it masks exploitation.

Taking Back the Narrative

We’re not here to ignore National Forest Week; we’re here to reclaim it.

At the John Muir Project, we’re using this week to spotlight the inconvenient truths often left out of the romanticized celebrations. Because while National Forests are being uplifted in press releases and Instagram reels, they’re also being logged under false pretenses, fragmented by roads, and opened to fossil fuel development, all in the name of “restoration,” “resilience,” “community safety,” or “multiple use.”

We observe this week differently because we believe true celebration must come with accountability. It must include hard conversations about climate, fire, colonization, and industrial exploitation. And it must center the forest itself, not just what it gives us.

That means telling the truth about what’s happening, calling out false solutions, pushing for policies that genuinely defend these ecosystems, and rejecting those that green light their destruction under the guise of sustainability.

To defend forests is to respect them. Not as timber stockpiles or carbon offsets. Not as “fuels” to be managed. But as living, dynamic systems with integrity of their own, deserving of protection simply because they exist. We ask that you join us in pushing back against greenwashing and fighting for the protection these landscapes truly deserve.