Logging Plan in Alaska Forest Overturned on Appeal

A federal appeals court Friday struck down a management plan that allows logging on roadless areas in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, handing environmentalists a victory in a long-running battle over wild lands in the world’s largest intact temperate rain forest.

In a wide-ranging decision, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a 1997 plan adopted by the U.S. Forest Service under the Clinton administration exaggerated the demand for Tongass timber, failed to take into account the impact on wildlife and did not adequately consider options that called for timber cutting in fewer roadless areas.

“This is a huge win,” said Niel Lawrence, an attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council, one of the conservation groups that challenged the plan in court. “It stops in its tracks what many people think is the most expensive, shameful and unjustified use of public lands in the country.”

A Forest Service spokesman said the agency was reviewing the decision, which temporarily blocks a pending logging project and requires managers to develop a new plan for the Tongass. “We’re going to spend the next couple of weeks assessing all our options,” said Tongass spokesman Dennis Neill. “We’re going to be deeply engaged in it, but fortunately we don’t have to have answers to all the [issues] today.”

The largest national forest, the Tongass covers 17 million acres in southeast Alaska, of which more than 9 million acres have no roads. About half of the roadless areas are forested, and the Tongass has been at the forefront of battles over the preservation of roadless wild lands. The Tongass fight helped inspire a 2001 Clinton administration order barring timber cutting and other development on roadless national forest lands across the country.

The Bush administration in 2003 exempted the Tongass from those protections. This year, it tossed out the rest of the Clinton road ban in favor of a still-evolving program that gives states a greater say over the fate of roadless areas in national forests.

The 1997 management plan for the Tongass allowed logging on 3.9 million acres, 60% of them roadless -- although the Forest Service said logging had been slated for only 330,000 of those acres. When the Bush administration withdrew the Tongass protections, the 1997 plan came back into play and a coalition of conservation groups filed suit to block timber cutting in the roadless areas.

A federal district court in Alaska ruled against them, upholding the Forest Service plan. Friday’s opinion by the 9th Circuit reverses that decision and sends the case back to the lower court.

The three-judge appeals panel concluded that environmental documents prepared by the Forest Service for the 1997 plan were “misleading” because they wrongly interpreted an analysis of the market for Tongass timber, saying it was twice the actual estimate.

The Forest Service had admitted the error but argued that the market data was not very important in shaping the 1997 plan -- a contention the appeals court rejected.

“Common sense, as well as the record, tells us that the Forest Service’s assessment of market demand was important for its determination ... of how much timber is allowed to be cut.... It is clear that trees are not to be cut nor forests leveled for no purpose,” the judges wrote.

Owen Graham, executive director of the Alaska Forest Assn., said the timber industry never liked the 1997 plan because it didn’t allow for enough logging -- and even that volume of timber harvest had been thwarted by environmental lawsuits.

“This is how much wood our industry needs, and the Forest Service can supply that off a tiny portion of the national forest. And we’d like them to get their [environmental] work done correctly and start providing that amount of timber,” Graham said. Mill jobs have fallen from several thousand to 700 and more than half a dozen mills have closed because not enough logs are coming off the Tongass, he added.

But environmentalists say international competition and outdated plants have more to do with the mill closings than the amount of wood being cut in the Tongass. Citing figures confirmed by the Forest Service, conservationists say nearly half of the Tongass timber on the market between 1998 and 2004 went unsold. And most of the sales involved a single bidder.

“The fight on the Tongass has always been over the small minority of trees that are huge and towering and glorious to look at and essential for wildlife,” Lawrence said. “It’s never been about the majority of the forest.... Perhaps half of the really big trees are gone already.”