Reject Tongass Logging Plan

At 17 million acres, the Tongass is America's largest national forest. Strewn among the islands and along the coast of Alaska's Inside Passage, it's also the world's largest intact temperate rain forest; a place of lushness and beauty that is home to ancient Sitka spruce, bald eagles, bears, wolves and five species of wild salmon.

Stymied in efforts to construct new roads in national forests, the Bush administration is now trying to subject Alaska's Tongass National Forest to death by a thousand cuts.

At 17 million acres, the Tongass is America's largest national forest. Strewn among the islands and along the coast of Alaska's Inside Passage, it's also the world's largest intact temperate rain forest; a place of lushness and beauty that is home to ancient Sitka spruce, bald eagles, bears, wolves and five species of wild salmon.

It's a destination for tourists who come from around the world to fish, hunt, hike or just bear witness to one of the world's last wild places.

Under a new management plan for the Tongass, the U.S. Forest Service is proposing to open about 3.4 million acres to logging, mining and road building. Roughly 2.4 million of those acres are now roadless.

The plan also sets aside 90,000 acres to old-growth reserves and protects 47,000 acres considered most vulnerable to development. It also calls for a phased approach to logging as a way to encourage a more stable, long-term supply of timber.

Forestry officials say the plan balances the needs of the timber industry with the requirements for a healthy forest.

We think it grossly undervalues the Tongass' uniqueness as an environmental asset and its economic potential as a destination for the growing eco-tourism industry.

Traditionally, exploiting the Tongass' natural resources for logging and mining has been a bad deal for America's taxpayers. In 2005, for example, the Forest Service spent $48.5 million on road building in the Tongass. That same year, the logging industry paid the government only $500,000 in revenues.

But those aren't logging's only costs. It also means the destruction of rare old-growth trees and habitat, increased erosion into streams and the loss of fish habitat.

Logging accounts for less than 1 percent of the area's economy. By far the largest industries are commercial fishing, tourism and recreation.

The so-called roadless rule championed by the Clinton administration and adopted in 2001 protected millions of acres of the nation's forests from new road construction and logging. The Bush administration has tried various ways to get around the rule, including an unsuccessful attempt to repeal a federal rule limiting new roads in national forests.

In pursuing a policy of greater subsidies and expanded logging in the Tongass, the administration is putting the region's most important economies — and the forest's economic future — at risk.