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Tongass Timber Travesty
Tongass National Forest

$150 million

Southeast Alaska's magnificent Tongass National Forest is where the U.S. Forest Service does more logging and road building in pristine old growth forests, and loses more taxpayer money, than anywhere else. Since 1982, the United States government has spent well in excess of a half billion dollars on industrial scale logging and related activities in the Tongass - one of the world's last great remaining temperate rainforests. According to the General Accounting Office, American taxpayers subsidized this destruction to the tune of $354 million from 1982-1988, and $204.7 million from 1992 to 1998.

Expensive and harmful logging and road construction in currently unroaded, undeveloped Tongass watersheds was scheduled to end under the nationwide Roadless Areas Conservation Rule adopted in early 2001. But the rule has been suspended, and protections in a 1999 Tongass management plan eliminated, by timber industry lawsuits. Now the Forest Service is managing the Tongass under a 1997 set of rules that led the New York Times to write: "The plan will almost surely be a bad deal for taxpayers." This editorial opinion is proving all too prophetic, as the agency presses ahead with an aggressive timber sale program on the Tongass that concentrates heavily on roadless areas, where logging costs - and taxpayer losses - are highest.

Green Scissors Proposal
Improve Tongass management by eliminating destructive, taxpayer-subsidized logging and road construction in undeveloped portions of southeast Alaska's Tongass National Forest. Doing so would save at least $150 million over five years without eliminating the timber industry in Southeast Alaska. In Fiscal Year 2001, the Forest Service sold 49.6 million board feet of timber, and 47.8 million were cut, levels easily sustained without opening up pristine, roadless watersheds.

Current Status
The Forest Service is managing the Tongass under a contested 1997 management plan that proposes to build over 1,100 new miles of taxpayer-subsidized logging roads while clearcutting more than 85,000 acres of old-growth rainforest over a 10-year period. Last year, Congress added an additional $10 million over and above the administration's request for Tongass timber logging and road building. In FY00, Congress also spent $4 million to help the for-profit Sealaska Corporation develop a facility that would use Tongass trees and wood waste to produce ethanol in the region.

Situated in Southeast Alaska, the Tongass is a rugged land of tree-covered islands, jagged mountains, and deep fjords. The wildness and remoteness of the Tongass make it an expensive place to log - the most expensive place in America according to government reports. Logging in roadless areas here means blasting and bulldozing through pristine forests and fragile wetlands in order to reach commercially valuable pockets of timber. These slashes through the forest can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per mile to build. And helicopter logging, the only alternative, costs even more. Without massive tax subsidies, most of these operations would never take place.

Program Hurts Taxpayers

The Tongass timber program is the biggest money loser in the national forest system. In a single recent year, 1998, the Forest Service by its own account lost $33.7 million on the Tongass - 37% of that year's losses for the entire national forest timber program. Increased expenditures for the timber sale program will lead to increased costs to the taxpayer. Such increased expenditures are particularly unjustified given the low demand for Tongass logs - though the timber target is set at 267 million board feet per year, only 47.5 million board feet was sold in 2001.

Increased logging would create more dependence on federal timber in the Tongass. That, in turn, undermines the federal government's investment of more than $142 million in direct aid to Southeast Alaska communities over the last 5 years, money that was supposed to promote the transition away from a timber-dependent economy. In 1997, Congress spent an additional $143 million to pay off timber giant Louisiana-Pacific Corporation to settle a dispute over ending the company's monopoly contract for huge numbers of Tongass logs.

Increased Tongass logging levels also threaten other forest-dependent industries. Commercial fishing and tourism both employ more people than does timber, and tourism is the fastest growing part of the regional economy. In the timber industry, by contrast, much of what the Forest Service offers at rock-bottom prices currently goes unsold in an unstable and increasingly soft timber economy.

Program Hurts the Environment

Logging destroys essential habitat for Alaska's brown bears, wolves, salmon, bald eagles, goshawks, and many other fish and wildlife species. If the subsidies continue, clearcutting and other destructive logging techniques will directly devastate up to 8,500 acres yearly. But a much larger area, as much as 400,000 acres per decade, of roadless areas will be fragmented, their globally famous pristine character lost forever.

Already there are 4,650 miles of roads in the Tongass, but the Forest Service plans to build as many as 1,110 new miles of timber roads over the next 10 years. Logging roads add sediment and mud to Tongass streams, impairing world-class trout and salmon habitat. The Forest Service and Alaska Department of Fish & Game recently reported that 2/3 of logging road culverts on Tongass salmon streams block fish passage. Out of an estimated $20 million backlog in fish passage problems, the Forest Service has been budgeting only $500,000 per year to fix failing roads. At this rate, it would take 40 years to fix current fish passage problems on the Tongass, let alone the new ones attributable to increased roading.

Contacts

• Marty Hayden, Earthjustice Legal Defense Fund, (202) 667-4500;
• Buck Lindekugel, Southeast Alaska Conservation Council, (907) 586-6942;
• Amy Mall, Natural Resources Defense Council, (202) 289-2365;
• Chris Soderstrom, Alaska Rainforest Campaign, (202) 544-0475;
• Tim Bristol, Alaska Coalition, (907) 586-6667.