This is America’s Amazon.”. Environmentalists say that it could devastate a vast wilderness of snowy peaks, rushing rivers and virgin old-growth forest that is widely viewed as one of America’s treasures. Supporters in Alaska said have long said that lifting the roadless rule protections in their state would provide a sorely needed economic boost. We Insist: A Timeline Of Protest Music In 2020, announced Tuesday by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Trump Wants To Exempt Tongass National Forest From Roadless Rule.

The proposal, announced Tuesday by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, comes in response to a request from the state, which wants to be fully exempted from a Clinton-era rule that limits road construction and timber harvesting in tens of millions of acres of national forest. “The Forest Service’s environmental impact statement is junk science on assessing the impacts of releasing the carbon,” said Dominick DellaSala, a scientist with the Earth Island Institute, a nonprofit environmental organization. The United States Forest Service, an agency of the Department of Agriculture, on Friday published an environmental study concluding that lifting the roadless rule protections in the Tongass would not significantly harm the environment. Trump Administration Releases Plan to Open Tongass Forest to Logging The effort to open the Alaskan wilderness area, the nation’s largest national forest, has … 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. "What we want is year-round manufacturing jobs and a lot more stability," he says. The effort to open the Alaskan wilderness area, the nation’s largest national forest, has been in the works for about two years. It would undercut a sweeping Clinton administration policy known as the “roadless rule,” which has survived a decades-long legal assault. 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. In 2016, the agency finalized a plan to phase out old-growth logging in the Tongass within a decade. The Forest Service has approved at least 55 projects in roadless areas, according to the agency, including 36 for mining and 10 related to the power sector. A proposal that would have lowered electricity costs in the Alaskan community of Kake by connecting its supply to neighboring Petersburg, he said, won approval only after a lengthy review, which imposed requirements that boosted the price tag into the tens of millions. Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, who has urged Mr. Trump to lift the rule, contends that removing the roadless protections would help Alaska’s economy, but not necessarily lead to the loss of major swaths of the forest. Graham is uncertain how long it will take to see big systemic changes in how the Tongass National Forest is managed. A decade ago, Idaho officials opened up roughly 400,000 acres of roadless areas to ease operations for a phosphate mine while protecting 8.9 million acres in exchange. "Every year we lose more of our loggers because there's not enough to keep everyone going.". proposed to open almost all of the National Petroleum Reserve, Last month the administration imposed new conditions. One former Trump staffer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid retaliation, said forest policy has become “an obsession of his.”. Climate scientists also point out that the Tongass, which is also one of the world’s largest temperate rain forests, offers an important service to the billions of people across the planet who are unlikely to ever set foot there: It is one of the world’s largest carbon sinks, storing the equivalent of about 8 percent of the carbon stored in all the forests of the lower 48 states combined. They argue that the protections are stifling the local economy.

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