More than 3 million acres of pristine wilderness in Alaska's Tongass National Forest would be open to logging and road building under a new management plan released Friday by the U.S. Forest Service.
At 17 million acres, roughly the size of West Virginia, the Tongass National Forest in southeastern Alaska is the country's largest national forest and the world's largest intact coastal temperate rain forest. It contains grizzly and black bears, wolves, eagles and five species of wild Alaskan salmon.
Under the new plan, about 3.4 million acres of the forest would be open to logging and development. Of this acreage, about 2.4 million is in roadless areas, and about 663,000 acres is considered to have trees valuable for timber production.
Local officials hailed the plan as a reasonable way to maintain the area's logging economy. But environmentalists portrayed it as the latest in a series of attempts by the Bush administration to dismantle Clinton-era protections of roadless areas and open them to logging before President Bush leaves office. Land management plans usually remain in effect for a decade.
"We're at a crucial time right now to make sure we're looking at a future that retains some of this landscape and some of this way of life for future generations," said Laurie Cooper, rain forest program director for the Alaska Wilderness League. "So much of a focus of the management plan is logging, when in fact, it's less than 1% of the economy . . . when in fact, commercial fishing [and] tourism and recreation are the two largest private industries that depend on the forest."
The plan puts aside 90,000 acres of old-growth reserves that are off-limits to logging, and protects 47,000 acres of karst lands, which are limestone formations considered vulnerable to development. The Forest Service also plans to consult with Indian tribes to protect and maintain sacred sites in the forest.
The new framework amends the 1997 management plan, which underwent 33 appeals through nearly a decade of debate and litigation involving the timber industry, environmentalists and the U.S. Forest Service. Many expect both sides to appeal the latest plan.
"The new plan suffers from the same central problem of the old plan," said Tom Waldo, an attorney for Earthjustice in Juneau, Alaska. He helped file the lawsuit against the 1997 blueprint. "It still leaves 2.4 million acres of wild, roadless backcountry areas open to clear-cutting and new logging roads."
