On Jan. 25, the Biden administration finalized “roadless rule” protections for the Tongass National Forest in Southeast Alaska. The move limits potential logging and helps conserve the region’s old-growth forests, which are central to the cultures, traditions and lifeways of the Tlingit, Haida and Tsimshian peoples.
The change is just the latest in a decades-long volley of reinforced and rescinded protections for the Tongass. It reinstates the 2001 National Roadless Area Conservation Rule in the forest, a landmark federal rule meant to prevent logging and road construction in parts of national forests largely untouched by human development. In doing so, the new action reverses a Trump-era decision that had lifted such protections from more than half of the 17-million-acre national forest, the largest in the United States.
The Tongass is a temperate rainforest of towering cedar, hemlock, spruce and other trees known for its old-growth stands. But only about 60% of it is forested. The remainder is covered by rock, glaciers, muskeg bogs — open areas of peatland and ponds — and water. This ecosystem supports a vast array of wildlife, and human life, too: Salmon, bears, deer, wolves and more co-exist with a dwindling logging industry, now shifting to young-growth harvest, as well as a revitalization of carving and other cultural wood practices, such as raising totem poles and making dugout canoes. It’s a vibrant, vital place — and now its future is more firmly protected.
Emily Benson is a senior editor at High Country News, covering the northwest, the northern Rockies and Alaska. We welcome reader letters. Email her at emilyb@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.
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