Alaska Governor Pushes for More Logging

Just two years after Congress curtailed clear-cutting in Tongass National Forest, timber industry advocates are urging the federal government to boost logging by almost 25%.

Alaska Gov. Walter Hickel has called on the U.S. Forest Service to abandon its planned harvest limit of 419 million board feet a year in the largest national forest.

Hickel argues that the agency should allow up to 521 million board feet to be logged, far beyond historic harvests at the primeval, glacier-studded forest that blankets mountainous southeast Alaska.

Hickel and logging advocates say bigger timber cuts are needed to keep the region’s two pulp mills operating at capacity and to preserve jobs.

They say the landmark 1990 Tongass Timber Reform Act, which imposed restrictions on logging in the 16.9-million-acre forest, should be overhauled.

“We think that the whole area should be looked at afresh,” said Malcolm Roberts, a Hickel aide. “If the anti-growth forces keep restricting human activity to a smaller and smaller acreage, we’ll just end up in warfare.”

But environmentalists say Hickel is the one disrupting the uneasy truce established by the 1990 Tongass reforms.

“He’s basically undoing all the work that these people have put into the Tongass Timber Reform Act,” said Chris Finch of the Southeast Alaska Conservation Council.

For decades, the forest has been the target of warring factions. Conservationists, fishermen and Tlingit and Haida Indians prize it as the world’s last major old-growth temperate rain forest and the source of abundant wildlife and rich salmon runs.

But it is also used to supply the large pulp mills in Sitka and Ketchikan that dominate the economies there and support the region’s smaller sawmills and logging camps.

The Forest Service, which in 1940 predicted that the Tongass would supply 78 billion board feet of commercial timber, set up 50-year contracts for the pulp mills in the 1950s.

Critics view the contracts as sweetheart deals that encouraged industry to mow down the ecosystem.