The Tongass National Forest, near Ketchikan, Alaska. Chris Wood, president of the environmental group Trout Unlimited, joined with local business owners and conservation and outdoors organizations in urging federal officials to make more limited changes to the rule. 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 this year. But conservation groups say that removing protections would hurt the region's fishing and tourism industries, while also worsening the effects of climate change. Trump’s decision to weigh in, at a time when Forest Service officials had planned much more modest changes to managing the agency’s single largest holding, revives a battle that the previous administration had aimed to settle. This is America’s Amazon.”.
But Robert Venables, executive director of the Southeast Conference, said permitting for some projects has taken years and made them too costly to complete. “They need to keep the trees standing in order to keep the fish in the creeks,” Wood said. The rest of the land would remain protected under other state and federal statutes. “It should never have been applied to our state, and it is harming our ability to develop a sustainable, year-round economy for the Southeast region, where less than one percent of the land is privately held,” she said.
The immediate impact would be to open up 168,000 acres of old growth forest, and 20,000 acres of younger forests, to loggers’ chainsaws. Owen Graham, President of Alaska Forest Association, tells Alaska's Energy Desk that Tuesday's announcement a "great thing.". With much, much more to come. Supporters in Alaska said have long said that lifting the roadless rule protections in their state would provide a sorely needed economic boost. “They are saying that the carbon that would be released by logging the timber is insignificant,” he said. "We have to be able to have a plan that is specific to us," Murkowski told CoastAlaska in August, explaining that she spoke with the Trump administration early on about addressing the Roadless Rule. Graham is uncertain how long it will take to see big systemic changes in how the Tongass National Forest is managed. The president was widely ridiculed after suggesting during a visit to Paradise, the California community devastated by a 2018 wildfire, that the United States could curb such disasters by following Finland’s model, claiming that nation spends “a lot of time on raking and cleaning and doing things, and they don’t have any problem.”. The move comes as President Trump wraps up a first term in which he aggressively targeted environmental protections, rolling back or weakening more than 100 regulations that had been designed to protect the nation’s air, water and public lands from pollution.
If the timber industry in Alaska is looking to harvest more trees, the Trump administration's proposal to open roadless areas in Tongass National Forest to logging might not be the way to get there. Speaking to reporters on June 26, after meeting with Trump during a refueling stop at Elmendorf Air Force Base, Dunleavy said of the president, “He really believes in the opportunities here in Alaska, and he’s done everything he can to work with us on our mining concerns, timber concerns; we talked about tariffs as well. He said the shift could jeopardize the region’s commercial, sport and subsistence salmon fishing industry. "By seeking to weaken the Roadless Rule's protections, the Forest Service is prioritizing one forest use — harmful logging — over mitigating climate change, protecting wildlife habitat, and offering unmatched sight-seeing and recreation opportunities found only in southeast Alaska," said Josh Hicks of The Wilderness Society in a statement. Temperate rainforests sequester huge amounts of carbon dioxide, keeping the climate-warming gas out of the atmosphere. The 2016 plan identified 962,000 acres as suitable for commercial timber and suggested no more than 568,000 acres of that should be logged. Congress has designated more than 5.7 million acres of the forest as wilderness, which must remain undeveloped under any circumstances. The Tongass National Forest, near Ketchikan, Alaska. “The timber industry has declined precipitously, and it is astonishing that the few remaining mills in our nation’s largest national forest have to constantly worry about running out of supply.”, Alaskan leaders have found a powerful ally in the president. The question of what sort of roads should be built in the United States’ remaining wild forests sparked intense battles in the 1990s, culminating in the 2001 rule affecting a third of the Forest Service’s holdings in a dozen states. A decade ago, Idaho officials opened up roughly 400,000 acres of roadless areas to ease operations for a phosphate mine while protecting 8.9 million acres in exchange. Wood, who worked on the Clinton rule while at the Forest Service, said that in recent years, agency officials have “realized the golden goose is the salmon, not the trees.”. The proposal, announced Tuesday by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, comes in response to a request from the state, which wants to be fully exempted from a Clinton-era rule that limits road construction and timber harvesting in tens of millions of acres of national forest. The remaining big trees provide critical habitat for brown bears, Sitka black-tailed deer, a bird of prey called the Northern Goshawk and other species, he added.
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