Plan released to open Tongass Forest

WASHINGTON >> President Donald Trump’s administration on Friday finalized its plan to open about 9 million acres of the pristine woodlands of Alaska’s Tongass National Forest to logging and road construction.

The administration’s effort to open the Tongass, the nation’s largest national forest, has been in the works for about two years, and the final steps to complete the process have been widely expected for months. They come after years of prodding by successive Alaska governors and congressional delegations, which have pushed the federal government to exempt the Tongass from a Bill Clinton- era policy known as the roadless rule, which barred logging and road construction in much of the national forest system.

The U. S. Forest Service, an agency of the Department of Agriculture, on Friday published an environmental study concluding that lifting the roadless rule protections in the Tongass would not significantly harm the environment. That study will allow the agency to formally lift the rule in the Tongass within the next 30 days, clearing the way for the

Trump administration to propose timber sales and road construction projects in the forest as soon as the end of the year.

In a 2019 draft of the study, the Forest Service said it would consider six possible changes to the rule. One would have maintained restrictions in 80% of the area protected by the rule; another would have opened up about 2.3 million acres to logging and construction. In a statement, the Department of Agriculture said that its “preferred alternative” is to “fully exempt the Tongass National Forest from the 2001 Roadless Rule.”