Reduced Logging a Sidelight of Spill : Alaska: Restoration fund has made habitat protection a priority, purchasing thousands of acres of land and millions in timber rights.

Environmental activists relish the irony: The disaster that fouled Alaska’s coast with oil in 1989 is now saving parts of it from logging.

To compensate the government for oil damages to natural resources, Exxon Corp. agreed in 1991 to pay $900 million into a restoration fund.

Since then, the fund’s state and federal trustees have made habitat protection a priority.

Last year, they bought 42,000 acres of private land near Kodiak Island to create the new Afognak Island State Park. They also purchased $7.5 million of private inholdings in an existing state park on the Kenai Peninsula.

In May, the trustees bought $2 million in timber rights from an Alaska Native corporation preparing to log 2,000 acres of evergreen forest on the shores of Prince William Sound.

As part of the deal, Eyak Corp. suspended logging plans for 60,000 acres so the trustees could negotiate to buy more timber rights.

All this pleases environmentalists, who have lobbied for years to preserve the forested islands of Prince William Sound and Alaska’s southeastern panhandle.

But not everyone is happy. Some commercial fishermen say research into the oil spill’s long-term ecological impacts was shortchanged by trustees’ emphasis on habitat protection.

Of the $340 million spent or budgeted so far, $43 million has gone toward habitat protection and $17 million toward research and monitoring.

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Other Alaskans say discouraging timber harvests is no way to help coastal communities recover economically from the oil spill.

Still others don’t want more Alaska land “locked up” in parks.

“They’re using the oil spill as an excuse to acquire these lands,” said Steve Ward, a hunter and fisherman in Chenega Bay. “They have no intention of using them, but they’re going to stop us from using them.”

For her part, Sue Libenson of the Alaska Rainforest Campaign sees habitat protection as one of the few useful things done since 1989 to address the damage left by the wreck of the Exxon Valdez.

“The oil spill is a done deal, from an environmental point of view,” she said.

“The forest is the real issue of the moment. We’ll be able to look back, 30 years from now, and say that at least we didn’t log these areas--at least the public got something out of it.”’