The State of Minnesota should lose its sustainable forestry certification due to its reliance on timber quotas at the expense of wildlife protection and resource conservation, according to complaints filed last week by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). Loss of this eco-certification would lower the value and marketability of timber harvested from Minnesota Department of Natural Resources (DNR) lands.
The complaints were filed with the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), which certifies that states are meeting its sustainability standards, and with Bureau Veritas, the third-party auditor that verifies FSC results. The complaints concern whether a series of problems highlighted by federal agencies and DNR’s own staff have been resolved or even considered by Bureau Veritas. PEER argues that the certification boards should consider:
- A scathing July 2025 report from the U.S Department of Interior’s Office of Inspector General which found that DNR’s timber program did not follow “accepted principles of wildlife conservation and management.”
- Sanctions imposed in 2024 by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, including withholding of an estimated $22 million in federal aid from DNR due to environmental violations by its logging program.
- Two employee surveys, one issued on October 14, 2025, by the Minnesota Office of the Legislative Auditor and the other by PEER in 2023, reflect the strong belief that management decisions about forest and related habitat resources protection are biased in favor of timber management.
“The core question is whether DNR’s timber program has been fundamentally reformed,” stated PEER’s Public Lands Advocate Chandra Rosenthal. “DNR’s prior timber practices could not be fairly classified as ‘sustainable.’”
Oak harvest in Carlos Avery Wildlife Management Area, Sunrise River headwaters. (Greg Seitz/St. Croix 360)
CURE, a Minnesota-based environmental group, has also raised concerns about the certification. Both PEER and CURE believe that the FSC Sustainability Certification is not valid since the certificate was issued before the audit began—raising concerns that the audit was a mere formality rather than a rigorous review. Specifically, Bureau Veritas issued the most recent certificate on October 29, 2025, prior to completing the field audit on December 5, 2025, and before releasing the final audit report on January 6, 2026.
PEER and CURE believe that the wood tagged and certified without consideration of the program’s large issues should not retain sustainable certification. The groups are questioning if all of the harvesting permits, wood products stamped with the certification, and wood products delivered to mills, retail outlets, and consumers were improperly presented as sustainable.
Though BV issued the report in January, it was not made available to the public until March 2026. It is still not available on the DNR webpage with the 2020 – 2024 Reports. One of the Council’s Principles and Criteria for Forest Stewardship stipulates that certificate recipient’s “shall make publicly available a summary of the results of monitoring free of charge, excluding confidential information.”
“Sustainable forestry certification is supposed to be more than a rubber stamp,” Hudson Kingston, CURE’s Legal Director stated. “Without transparency, the public has no basis for trusting the integrity of DNR’s timber management program.”
The Minnesota legislature held a hearing to examine these issues on April 7, 2026.
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