Ketchikan, AK -- For decades now the Sierra Club and its environmental allies have struggled to get the U.S. government to recognize the obvious. The temperate rainforests of the Tongass National Forest are a national treasure -- standing intact. Roughly the size of West Virginia and home to the largest coastal temperate rain forest in the world, the Tongass is more than double the size of the next largest national forest.
Stretching for more than 500 miles along the coast of Alaska, the Tongass includes islands, peninsulas, and fjords laced with small springs, streams, and rivers that that flow into pristine saltwater bays. In addition to hosting the country's highest concentration of bald eagles and supporting nearly half of Alaska's commercial salmon fishery, the Tongass National Forest and its roadless watersheds create an ideal home for grizzly and black bears, moose, deer, and wolves.
Logged, they would become a national disgrace and a fiscal liability.
Also for decades now, timber companies have seen in the Tongass a different kind of opportunity -- to be paid for destroying this national treasure by cutting its forests at a huge loss to the people who own them (you and I) at virtually no economic gain for anyone. The Alaska Congressional delegation has devised a variety of schemes to cover up the fact that all of the proposals to destroy the Tongass cost the taxpayers a fortune. So far, a million acres have been logged -- but nine million acres of old-growth forest remain intact.
The last round of this battle began in 2003, when the Bush administration proposed to exempt the entire Tongass from the Clinton administration's rule protecting wild forests and roadless areas in the National Forest System. During the remainder of the Bush administration, the Club and its environmental allies brought repeated legal actions that kept the timber industry from doing significant new road building or logging in the pristine areas of the Tongass. (There was controversy within the environmental community. Some groups wanted to compromise and allow logging in just some of the wild forests of the Tongass, but the Club always felt that the case for full protection was overwhelming.)
In 2009, after the State of Alaska asked the Obama administration to ratify the Bush exemption, the Club and other environmentalists sued to overturn the Bush proposal.
On Friday, Federal District Judge John Sedwick overturned the Bush administration exemption and restored the full protections of the Roadless Rule to America's largest wild forest. Although the Alaska delegation blasted the decision, it's good to see that sometimes the good guys do win -- if they are patient enough.