Bush opens part of Alaskan forest to loggers
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A 1990 photo of the Tongass National Forest on Prince of Wales Island in Alaska. The patches of bare land show where clear-cutting has occurred.
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WASHINGTON (AP) -- Reversing a Clinton-era policy, the Bush administration on Tuesday opened 300,000 more acres of Alaska's Tongass National Forest, the nation's largest, to possible logging or other development.
The administration will allow 3 percent of the forest's 9.3 million acres that were put off-limits to road-building by former President Clinton, to have roads built on them and perhaps opened to use by the timber industry. The Tongass comprises 16.8 million acres.
"The people of Alaska benefit," said spokesman Bill Bradshaw of the U.S. Forest Service, part of the Agriculture Department. "What's behind this is the legal challenge by the state. The main point is that it brought a resolution to the Alaska challenge."
The ruling builds on the Bush administration's decision in June to settle a lawsuit filed by Alaska that challenged the road-building ban. As part of the settlement, the administration agreed to exempt the Tongass and Chugach national forests from its planned revisions to the roadless rule.
Mark Rey, the Agriculture Department's undersecretary in charge of forest policy, said that as a practical matter, 95 percent of the roadless areas in the two national forests would remain off-limits to development.
That's because the administration, while reversing the ban on road-building in Alaska's forests that Clinton adopted just before he left office in 2001, is reverting to an earlier Clinton plan in 1997 that set special management rules for Alaskan forests.
"The bottom line is we've affirmed the 1997 Clinton Tongass plan, which affirms protection for 95 percent of the roadless (area) on the Tongass ... based on the best science available," Rey said.
John Passacantando, executive director of Greenpeace USA, accused the Bush administration of "gutting the last pristine temperate rain forest" in the United States. Tiernan Sittenfeld of the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, an advocacy organization, called it "yet another holiday gift to the timber industry."
But Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, said the decision "paves the way for a resumption of some wood harvest for the Tongass, enough to support the surviving timber industry in southeast Alaska."
Agriculture Department officials, with approval from the White House Office of Management and Budget, decided to exempt the acreage from the so-called roadless rule, an often-challenged Clinton-era policy.
Imposed in January 2001, the rule had sought to block development of 58.5 million acres, or nearly one-third of the national forests.
The rule was struck down in July by a federal district judge in Wyoming and currently is before the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Forest Service officials said their decision "maintains the balance for roadless area protection" while providing opportunities for sustainable economic development.
"People in 32 communities within the Tongass National Forest depend on the forest for subsistence and social and economic health," officials said in a statement. "Most communities lack road and utility connections to other communities."
In August, Alaska Gov. Frank Murkowski said the roadless rule, which effectively has locked away portions of the Tongass and the 5.3 million-acre Chugach national forests from major timber development, was "unlawful and unwise."
The Republican governor, a former senator, demanded that the Forest Service exempt Alaska from the roadless rule on grounds it violates the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, the Wilderness Act, the National Environmental Policy Act and the National Forest Management Act.
Former Democrat Gov. Tony Knowles also had filed a federal lawsuit in 2001 challenging the rule. A federal judge in Idaho blocked the roadless ban in May 2001, saying it needed to be amended, but that ruling was overturned last year by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Environmentalists said they were alarmed by the decision, and that it would mean the loss of protection for all 9.3 million acres of inventoried roadless areas.
"Our public lands are under attack," said Cindy Shogan of the Alaska Wilderness League. "The Bush administration won't be happy until the timber industry has reduced the heart of America's rain forest to stumps."
But Ray Massey, a spokesman in Juneau for the Forest Service's Alaska region, said those roadless areas still are protected by the 1997 Tongass Land Management Plan, allowing for development in some places but not in others, based on scientific reviews and other studies.
"They've just discounted what we consider to be one of the best land-management plans ever done," Massey said about claims by environmentalists. "We've been actively managing this place for 100 years."
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