Federal judge halts Shawnee National Forest logging project

A federal judge in East St. Louis has ordered the U.S. Forest Service to suspend a commercial logging project in southern Illinois’ Shawnee National Forest. The ruling found that the agency’s 2024 approval of the project violated the Endangered Species Act.

The judge determined that the Forest Service improperly approved the project in October 2024 without waiting for a final “biological opinion” from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. That opinion, issued six weeks after the initial approval, identified the 70-acre project area as a habitat for the federally protected Indiana bat.

Environmental groups had sued the Forest Service, alleging that an internal August 2024 assessment showed the logging would “likely to adversely affect” the endangered bats. The plaintiffs claimed the agency’s decision memo falsely suggested no endangered bats were detected in the area. The Forest Service argued that no resources were committed to the project until 2025 and that the subsequent biological opinion contained no new information that would have altered the original decision.