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Republicans Change Rules To Allow Destruction of Alaska's Tongass National Forest
Trump has instructed his Republican Agriculture Secretary to exempt Alaska's 16,700,000 acre Tongass National Forest from logging restrictions. This could potentially open up more than half of Tongass—the world's largest intact temperate rain forest—to logging, mining and energy projects.
Trump has instructed Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue to exempt Alaska’s 16.7-million-acre Tongass National Forest from logging restrictions imposed nearly 20 years ago.
The move would affect more than half of the world’s largest intact temperate rainforest, opening it to potential logging, energy and mining projects.
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.
The fate of the forest has long been uncertain even though most of us have never heard a thing about it. For the past two decades, the logging industry and its owned friends in Congress have been trying to exploit the forest's vast natural resources. However, there has been significant opposition from environmental groups, local Native communities and some politicians.
Politicians have tussled for years over the fate of the Tongass, a massive stretch of southeastern Alaska replete with old-growth spruce, hemlock and cedar, rivers running with salmon, and dramatic fjords. President Clinton put more than half of it off limits to logging just days before leaving office in 2001, when he barred the construction of roads in 58.5 million acres of undeveloped national forest across the country. George W. Bush sought to reverse that policy, holding a handful of timber sales in the Tongass before a federal judge reinstated the Clinton rule.
John Schoen, a retired wildlife ecologist who worked in the Tongass for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, co-authored a 2013 research paper finding that roughly half of the forest’s large old-growth trees had been logged last century. 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.
Alaska's politicians claim this is about jobs. It's NOT. It's about greed and money while destroying a protected environment that feeds us.
Timber provides a small fraction of southeastern Alaska’s jobs — just under 1 percent, according to the regional development organization Southeast Conference, compared with seafood processing’s 8 percent and tourism’s 17 percent.
About 40 percent of wild salmon that make their way down the West Coast spawn in the Tongass: The Forest Service estimates that the salmon industry generates $986 million annually. Returning salmon bring nutrients that sustain forest growth, while intact stands of trees keep streams cool and trap sediment.
ACTION: Sign the petition linked below.
Maintain Logging Restrictions for Tongass National Forest in Alaska - Sign the Petition! http://chng.it/zGTbjmL5
Sources:
https://www.newsweek.com/trump-logging-restrictions-alaska-tongass-largest-national-forest-1456553