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President Trump issued two new executive orders on March 1 to expand logging in national forests. They come after he suspended the Roadless Rule, which banned the construction of new roads in undeveloped wilderness and has flip-flopped with each presidency. Together, the orders could increase timber harvest in Tongass National Forest, but some locals aren’t so sure that will happen.
One order aims to get forestry projects approved more quickly, even if it means scraping out exemptions under the National Environmental Protection Act and the Endangered Species Act. The other order directs the U.S. Department of Commerce to investigate whether importing lumber is a national security risk, and how the government could step in to address that.
The Tongass National Forest is the country’s largest national forest at 17 million acres, and it’s one of the last protected temperate rainforests in the world. Locals say it has environmental value, but the main reason the orders probably won’t lead to more logging is that much of the industry has moved out.
Joel Jackson is president of the Organized Village of Kake, a tribe based on Kupreanof Island, and has seen logging come and go.
In economic terms, Jackson said that the real value of the forest is in tourism.
“People don’t want to come from down south and look at a scarred landscape,” he said. “They come up here because they like to look at the Tongass — the wildness of it.”
Millions of tourists travel to Southeast Alaska each year to experience the environment Jackson’s village depends on.
“The berries and medicinal plants and just everything it provides out there, and the animals — the deer, moose, bears — the shade from those old-growth trees along our streams that the salmon return to every year,” he said.
Now, since most lumber yards and pulp mills have closed shop, it’s costly for loggers to come harvest the trees and ship them out, Jackson said. He believes Trump’s orders won’t change the financial constraints of logging in this rugged and remote region.
Gordon Chew runs Tenakee Logging Company, a small father-son timber operation on Chichagof Island. He echoes Jackson’s sentiment, and said the industry would have to be completely redeveloped for the Tongass to deliver more timber.
“We don’t have people sitting on their hands that can’t wait to get into the forest and mow down all the trees,” he said.
Chew said he’s an environmentalist and his company sustainably harvests about 100 trees each year. They’re second growth — young trees that have grown back in areas that were heavily logged in the past.
“We live here in the heart of the Tongass National Forest, and don’t want to be a part of any deforestation or destruction. So we’ve always only purchased selective timber sales,” he says.
The Forest Service marks one out of no more than three trees in the selected tract, then Chew and his son carefully fell them by hand. He’s not convinced that Trump’s executive orders will accelerate logging in the Tongass, since the U.S. Forest Service is likely overwhelmed due to recent firings.
“They’re dealing with distraught human beings that have been cast aside,” Chew said. “So I know the hope was efficiency, but you don’t get more efficient with fewer people doing more work.”
If the administration is serious about increasing timber production, Chew suggests they go through Congress to streamline the approval process under the National Environmental Protection Act for small, sustainable operations like his.
“You can still have industry and do it responsibly,” he said, adding that environmental laws should be geared toward preventing wreckage, not preventing a couple of guys from thinning the over-crowded second-growth forest to build local cabins, boats and musical instruments.
Viking Lumber, a well-known logging company in the region, did not respond to a request for comment.
Robert Venables is the executive director of Southeast Conference, an organization that advocates for economic interests in the region. He said that there is room in the Tongass for additional logging, especially in second-growth areas, but it’s unlikely that the industry would scale up to the behemoth it once was.
“I believe it’s more likely to colonize the moon,” he said.
Because of the way the timber market has changed, Venables said that the past isn’t able to inform the future of the industry here.
The U.S. Forest Service declined an interview, but a spokesperson wrote that the agency will “continue to meet its commitments to protecting vulnerable wildlife while also meeting the President’s directive to provide the nation with abundant domestic timber, unhampered by burdensome, heavy-handed policies.”
Legal battles over logging in the Tongass roiled during Trump’s first term, and more could be on the way.
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