Forest Challenge in Alaska
Alaska’s Tongass National Forest is home to trees that were saplings when King John signed the Magna Carta eight centuries ago. It is one of the planet’s only remaining temperate rainforests and provides habitat for many species that have disappeared elsewhere. It is this landscape that captivates tourists on Alaskan cruises.
Unfortunately, the history of management in this stunning forest also is written in superlatives. “Sweetheart timber contracts to promote development led to massive clear-cutting, losing $900 million of the taxpayers’ money since 1982,” observes Karen Hardigg, a forest expert in our Anchorage office. “This logging threatens the scenery, wildlife, and other assets that are the true foundation of the region’s economy and are essential for community prosperity.”
The U.S. Forest Service is resisting efforts to reverse these misplaced priorities. The agency has recommended maximum logging levels six times greater than the amount cut in recent years. In 2005 a federal court of appeals rejected the long-term management plan that contained this proposal. Yet the Forest Service responded by writing a plan that was virtually the same. We are prepared to go back to court to challenge it.
In a second case, U.S. District Court Judge James Singleton recently ruled in our favor, blocking Forest Service plans to allow logging in a roadless area that Native Americans depend on as a source of food. Underpinning both cases, filed by Earthjustice with a number of partners, is analytical work by Wilderness Society economists. “Our research documents the steadily declining demand for Tongass timber,” says Dr. Spencer Phillips. “Changes in the markets, coupled with the exceptionally high cost of bulldozing roads and harvesting timber in the region, mean that the Tongass is unable to compete.” The Forest Service has overlooked these new realities. As a result, the agency overestimates the amount of timber that could be sold and sets aside too much acreage for logging, rather than for protection of broad ecosystem and community values.
Phillips and his colleagues produced two reports on the agency’s unrealistic projections and the importance of shifting the timber program into the 21st century. A third study details the many non-commodity economic benefits of wildlands in the Tongass and the Chugach, which is Alaska’s other national forest.
This economic evidence has proved useful on Capitol Hill, as well. Working with Taxpayers for Common Sense and other allies, we helped build support for House passage of the Chabot-Andrews Amendment, which would end subsidies for Tongass logging roads. We are trying to make this provision part of the Interior appropriations bill, which Congress is debating this fall. Please urge your senators to support adoption of this amendment.
