Trump to strip protections from Tongass National Forest in Alaska
WASHINGTON » President Donald Trump will open upmore than half of Alaska’s Tongass National Forest to logging and other forms of development, according to a notice posted Wednesday, stripping protections that had safeguarded one of the world’s largest intact temperate rainforests for nearly two decades.
As of Thursday, it will be legal for logging companies to build roads and cut and remove timber throughout more than 9.3 million acres of forest - featuring oldgrowth stands of red and yellow cedar, Sitka spruce and Western hemlock. The relatively-pristine expanse is also home to plentiful salmon runs and imposing fjords. The decision, which will be published in the Federal Register, reverses protections President Bill Clinton put in place in 2001 and is one of the most sweeping public lands rollbacks Trump has enacted.
The new rule states that it will make “an additional 188,000 forested acres available for timber harvest,” mainly “old growth timber.”
For years, federal and academic scientists have identified Tongass as an ecological oasis that serves as a massive carbon sink while providing key habitat for wild Pacific salmon and trout, Sitka black- tailed deer and myriad other species. It boasts the highest density of brown bears in North America, and its trees - some of which are between 300 and 1,000 years old - absorb at least 8% of all the carbon stored in the entire Lower 48’s forests combined.
“While tropical rainforests are the lungs of the planet, the Tongass is the lungs of North America,” Dominick DellaSala, chief scientist with the Earth Island Institute’s Wild Heritage project, said in an interview. “It’s America’s last climate sanctuary.”
While Trump has repeatedly touted his commitment to planting trees through the One Trillion Tree initiative, invoking it as recently as last week, his administration has sought to expand logging in Alaska and in the Pacific Northwest throughout his presidency. Federal judges have blocked several of these plans as illegal: Last week, the administration abandoned its appeal of a ruling that struck down a 1.8 million-acre timber sale on the Tongass’s Prince of Wales Island.
Alaska Republicans - including Gov. Mike Dunleavy and Sen. Dan Sullivan, who is locked in a tight reelection race - lobbied the president to exempt the state from the roadless rule on the grounds that it could help the economy in Alaska’s southeast. Fishing and tourism account for 26% of regional employment, according to the Southeast Conference, a regional business group, compared with timber’s 1%.
When Sullivan briefed Trump on the Tongass earlier this year, according to an individual familiar with the conversation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak frankly, the president asked him, “How the [expletive] do you have an economy without roads?”
Asked about the exchange, the White House declined to comment.
Southeast Alaska’s economy has taken an enormous hit during the pandemic. Robert Venables, the executive director of the Southeast Conference, said in an interview that though 1.4 million cruise passengers typically visit the region each summer, that number dropped to just 48 people this summer. The area’s fisheries also have suffered because of climate change, and the global economic crisis hurt seafood prices.
“The economy is collapsing,” he said, adding that the Trump administration’s action might allow loggers to extract timber from some relatively accessible oldgrowth stands. “There’s some common-sense, nearterm relief.”
But even Venables criticized the administration as going too far and predicted that the decision probably would be reversed next year if Democrats won the White House.
“It seems like the ball’s being punted from one end to the other,” he said. “The real disappointment here is a compromise could not be found that could create a more lasting peace.”