"Roadless Rule"

Alaska’s congressional delegation and governor are welcoming the Trump administration’s decision to fully exempt the Tongass National Forest from the Clinton-era Roadless Rule. That’s a federal regulation that generally restricts road-building and industrial activity on national forest lands that don’t already have them.

Industry figures are also applauding the decision.

“The forest products industry … has been imperiled for some time,” said Tessa Axelson of the Alaska Forest Association, a Ketchikan-based timber industry group. “There’s a handful of small operators that are working on the Tongass, harvesting timber. In order to continue to survive, those businesses are dependent on a predictable supply of timber.”

And lifting the rule, she says, provides that predictable supply. She says the industry supports hundreds of jobs, including businesses that aren’t directly related to logging. But she says she doesn’t think lifting the rule will mean large-scale timber operations will come roaring back.

“We have no belief that that level of operation in the Tongass will occur again,” she said.

The U.S. Forest Service says lifting the Roadless Rule would open up about 168,000 old-growth acres to potential logging. That’s about 2% of the area protected by the rule, or 1% of the total Tongass.

But it’s not just about timber. Frank Bergstrom is a mining consultant in Juneau with some 40 years of experience. He says it could make mineral exploration more attractive to investors.

“There’s no roadmap to these things,” he said. “It’s just, maybe it’ll lead to a little more optimism.”

But he says development projects still require other forms of federal review.

“This is one obstacle that has at least been diminished. But there’s a long road to hoe,” he said.

Roadless Rule supporters dispute that it held up economic development in the region. The U.S. Forest Service routinely approved waivers for energy, mining and infrastructure projects in designated roadless areas, says Austin Williams of Trout Unlimited in Anchorage.

“The only reason for a full repeal of the roadless rule on the Tongass is to open up areas for logging,” he said. “Every single other alternative would have allowed non logging projects to move forward as they have in the past.”

The public comments received inside and outside Alaska were overwhelmingly in support of keeping the rule. An information request from the Southeast Alaska Conservation Council found that 96% of public comments from within and outside Alaska favored keeping the rule in place.

Executive Director Meredith Trainor says it was pretty overwhelming.

“Just 1% of the total responses out of 15,000 that they looked at that they analyzed — just 1% wanted to see a total exemption from the Tongass,” she said.

Tribal leaders say people forage, hunt and fish in protected lands.

“Of course our reliance on the Tongass for our way of life. That is what we’re trying to protect as Natives in Southeast Alaska is our way of life,” said  Joel Jackson, president of the Organized Village of Kake on Kupreanof Island.

His was the first of a half-dozen tribes to withdraw its cooperation with the Forest Service. He says it became clear early on that their voices weren’t being listened to.

“They just completely ignored our, our input and input to the other five tribes. So I felt very disrespected,” he said.

Ken Rait is project director at the Pew Charitable Trusts, and he helped push for the original 2001 Roadless Rule. He says the federal government has downplayed the temperate rainforest’s value as a carbon sink as the effects of climate change worsen. And he says that because federal timber sales are a loss for federal taxpayers, economic arguments don’t add up.

“This decision has no basis in science. It has no basis in rational kind of fiscal policy. And it has no basis in so far as public support,” he said.

The Trump administration’s decision could be reversed through a court challenge or an act of Congress. Alternatively, another presidential administration could revisit the rule — but that would require public comment, meetings and another multi-year process.

Until then, some 9.4 million acres in the Tongass are no longer bound by the restrictions under the Clinton era Roadless Rule.

President Donald Trump’s administration announced Wednesday that it is finalizing its plans to reverse roadless protections for more than 9 million acres of the Tongass National Forest in Southeast Alaska, or a little less than 15,000 square miles.

The administration last month, in an environmental review, had already signified its plans to exempt the Tongass from 2001 “roadless rule.” And Wednesday’s announcement, in a preliminary version of a government publication called the Federal Register, was broadly expected.

The roadless rule was originally established in the final days of the Democratic Clinton administration, and it barred logging and road construction on some 58 million acres of national forest lands, including big swaths of the Tongass.

Since then, it’s been the subject of lawsuits, as well as requests for an exemption from Alaska elected leaders, who claim the rule has harmed the state’s timber industry and made it harder to develop mining and energy projects in Southeast Alaska.

Wednesday’s decision stems from a 2018 petition to U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue from former independent Alaska Gov. Bill Walker’s administration.

Environmental organizations quickly blasted the announcement, noting that 96% of public commenters supported preserving the roadless rule in the Tongass.

Advocates argue that reversing the roadless rule would harm Alaska Native subsistence traditions and Southeast Alaska’s burgeoning tourism industry. They also note that the reversal is unlikely to revive the region’s dwindling logging business, and say that it threatens the Tongass’ ability to absorb greenhouse gas emissions.

Environmental groups immediately called on Congress to reject the Trump administration’s decision, and the exemption could also be challenged in court.

This is a breaking news story and will be updated when more information is available. 

Changing a federal rule isn’t simple, but the Trump administration is on the verge of doing it. Last month it started a 30-day clock to completely exempt Tongass National Forest from the 2001 Roadless Rule.

The rule restricts — but does not prohibit — road building and resource development on some national forestlands. Critics say it locks up natural resources. To change it, the federal government is required to consult with tribal governments. And it did — nine Southeast Alaska tribes in all, whose traditional homelands are now part of the country’s largest national forest.

Bob Starbard is administrator of Hoonah Indian Association. When the federal government started its consultation, the tribe was the first to sign on as a cooperating agency. And he says at first it seemed like U.S. Forest Service officials were listening.

“The Tongass, which we sit in the middle of, is part and parcel of being Tlingit. We are people of the land,” Starbard said. “It became clear at the very end, however, that the game had already been fixed.”

By that he means the meetings, hearings and public comment periods — which were dominated by Alaskans who favor of keeping the rule intact — didn’t move the Forest Service. It recommended lifting the rule completely and is expected to make it official before the end of October.

“It’s just another broken promise to tribes as far as we’re concerned,” Starbard said.

The nine tribes said as much in an Oct. 13 letter to Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue and Forest Service chief Vicki Christiansen.

The three-page letter is unequivocal, with one sentence in boldface: “We refuse to endow legitimacy upon a process that has disregarded our input at every turn.” 

The letter demands an updated environmental impact statement reflecting that the tribes have withdrawn their cooperation.

Marina Anderson, administrator of the Organized Village of Kasaan on Prince of Wales Island, says is was clear that for the federal government, tribal consultation was not taken seriously.

“It was apparent that our participation — requested by the federal government in the throes of this rulemaking process — was a form of box checking, a form of the government saying that they had consulted with us properly and they met with the Indigenous people properly,” Anderson said. “And all of the information that was really relayed to the Forest Service from the tribes, in my perspective, that information was disregarded completely. And really, it distracted us from a lot of other things that we needed to focus on with our time as well.”

In a statement, USDA spokesman Larry Moore wrote that the tribes’ input “was integral to the agency’s analysis during the rulemaking process.”

Alaska’s congressional delegation has long chafed against the Clinton administration-era Roadless Rule.

Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski has been one of its most vocal critics. She addressed the Alaska Federation of Natives but didn’t mention this milestone during her 18 minutes of remarks. 

“We’ve ensured access to the Tongass by enacting legislation like the Sealaska lands bill and the mental health trust land exchange. We’ve got more on the way,” Murkowski said.

Republican Rep. Don Young applauded the rule change at a recent forum hosted by the Resources Development Council.

“I’m happy to say for those in the area, you know my position I’ve been there I’ve worked there. We’ve got it done. So let’s open up Southeast to the communities for their economic well being,” Young said.

It’s not just Alaska’s congressional delegation that wants to see the Roadless Rule repealed. Elected officials from across the spectrum have spoken out against it. 

Gov. Mike Dunleavy has applauded the Trump administration’s rollback. But it was his predecessor and political opponent — Gov. Bill Walker — who got the ball rolling. 

But Anderson says elected officials in Alaska have not listened to the majority of residents who oppose the rollback of the Roadless Rule.

“Alaska’s delegation, this entire time, has had industry’s best interest, and they’ve been in full support of the exemption,” she said.

A watchdog group hopes a lawsuit will shake loose more evidence of lost revenue from timber sales on the Tongass National Forest in Southeast Alaska. The borough government in Petersburg has also sought answers about what’s been done to fix problems, with little response.

Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility is a Maryland-based national watchdog group for current and former public sector workers. In the past, it has published internal documents from the U.S. Forest Service that pointed to problems with oversight, transparency and accounting for timber contracts on Prince of Wales Island and near Petersburg.

In August, the group asked the Forest Service to release its audit of Tongass timber sales under the Freedom of Information Act. That request has yet to be fulfilled, and the group is asking the courts to enforce the law.

The group’s Pacific director, Jeff Ruch, expects the audit will confirm those earlier findings.

“We think it’s timely in that as you know there’s an effort to dramatically expand logging on the Tongass by repealing the Roadless Rule, and that if past is prologue and they’ve lost money on these earlier sales, you may be looking at a new gusher of red ink from new sales,” Ruch said.

Ruch thinks the financials from the audit also should have been included in the recent environmental analysis used to grant a full exemption of the Tongass from the Clinton administration’s Roadless Rule. A decision on opening up more areas of the Tongass to logging and roadbuilding is expected in the coming weeks.

Elected officials and residents in Petersburg have also asked about the extent of lost revenues from past timber sales and what’s been done to correct oversight with sale administration. Alaska regional forester Dave Schmid said last November in a public meeting that the audit was nearly complete. Nearly a year before that, he said the agency was responding to timber sale issues.

KFSK and others submitted Freedom of Information requests for that audit in 2019, but the agency has not produced it.

The Petersburg borough has also sent letters seeking answers, dating back to 2018. Forest Service chief Vicki Christiansen responded in May 2019 that the agency would share more information.

“We look forward to sharing with you those actions aimed to address any findings identified by the audit,” Christiansen wrote.

Appeals to the Department of Agriculture’s Inspector General for a separate external review have so far been fruitless.

In 2016, staff with the Washington office of the Forest Service found, among other things, that timber companies are leaving behind lower value hemlock and cutting more of the high value cedar and spruce, which changes the economics of timber sales and how those are appraised and awarded.

George Woodbury of Wrangell is a board member for the Alaska Forest Association, an industry group.

“The reason it’s not being taken is because we got the long-term sales taken away and the pulp mills, so we don’t have the secondary manufacturing facilities,” Woodbury said. “We are no longer able to use everything that we were before. It’s the result of the environmental challenges and the fact that they shrunk the timber supply so much you can’t have an industry big enough to utilize all the wood.”

The Forest Service says it won’t comment on litigation. It referred inquiries to the Department of Justice, which did not immediately respond to questions this month.

The Trump administration announced last week that it’s planning a full rollback of the Clinton-era “Roadless Rule” for the Tongass National Forest. The administration described the goal of the rollback as “maximum additional timber harvest.”

The Roadless Rule, simply stated, forbids road building and industrial activity — with some exceptions — in areas that don’t already have them. It covers nearly 9.4 million acres, or just over half, of Southeast Alaska’s Tongass National Forest.

Addressing civic and business leaders at Southeast Conference on Friday, Sen. Lisa Murkowski praised the federal government’s decision.

The Republican U.S. senator has been a long-time critic of the Roadless Rule in Alaska.

“The Roadless Rule is not just about timber,” Murkowski said via videoconference link. “It is about reasonable access for a wide variety of users, whether it is for renewable energy that we work so hard to build, whether for recreation, whether for mineral — it is for all pieces of the Southeast economy.”

Alaska’s congressional delegation has long opposed the 2001 rule. So has the state of Alaska, which sued and settled with the feds to win an exemption that lasted about seven years.

So those applauding the decision say don’t expect boom times right away. Especially not with logging

“I don’t think it’s going to be any more intensive than it was when we had total exemption in the period from 2004 to 2011,”Jim Clark, former chief of staff to Gov. Frank Murkowski told CoastAlaska.

The Juneau attorney has been helping fight the Roadless Rule from the beginning. He predicts it’ll help the mining and energy sectors — especially hydropower — by making it cheaper and easier to build roads on federal forest lands. But it won’t happen overnight.

“It would be a mistake to oversell either the problems that are going to occur for the environmental community as a consequence of this, or to oversell how much economic development is going to occur,” Clark said.

Industry groups signal support

The Alaska Forest Association — a timber industry group — applauded the federal government’s decision.

“Application of the Roadless Rule to the Tongass was never appropriate and has stifled the timber industry, and the larger Southeast economy,” AFA Board President Bert Burkhart said in a statement.

The Roadless Rule has been popular in Alaska. The Forest Service says it received about 411,000 comments, most of those in favor of keeping the status quo.

And during two years of public hearings, Southeast Alaskans came out in person to defend it. The reasons varied: concern about deer and salmon habitat, preserving wild places for guides to bring tourists.

Tribes were particularly vocal about keeping the national forest intact.

“We want to keep what’s here because we know the effects of logging in our area,” Joel Jackson, tribal president of the Organized Village of Kake said by telephone on Friday. “Old growth timber areas provide for us … berries and our medicines and also to hunt the deer and moose in our area.”

The federal government is required by law to consult with federally recognized tribes that live around the Tongass. Jackson says he feels like the agency was just going through the motions.

“I felt like they didn’t really listen,” he said. “And it turned out they didn’t.”

D.C. timber lobbyist linked Gov. Dunleavy with U.S. Ag Secretary Perdue

Agency emails obtained in a records request by Southeast Alaska Conservation Council show a D.C. lobbyist working for the Alaska Forest Association set up a telephone call between U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue and Gov. Mike Dunleavy last year.

The governor’s office confirmed the May 7, 2019 call took place but would say nothing about what was discussed. The AFA, whose members were in Washington and in the room during the call, also declined comment.

The revelation of the joint timber industry/Alaska governor telephone call with Perdue has angered tribal leaders. Tribes had offered to travel to D.C. to meet with Secretary Perdue but were reportedly told only an undersecretary would be available to receive them.

Joel Jackson says it’s unfair that Trump administration cabinet officials will meet with industry but not tribal governments.

“They’re just the timber association and the tribes are sovereign nations,” Jackson said. “So that really upset me that we were brushed aside.”

Arguments against exemption range economic to ecological

Taxpayers have lost money on virtually every Tongass timber sale since the 1980s, says a D.C. budget watchdog group.

“We are concerned that opening up areas where they’re not currently roads to timber sales would increase taxpayer losses,” said Autumn Hanna, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan D.C. group.

Its recent report found that timber sales on federal lands cost taxpayers about $2 billion over the past 40 years.

“We’ve seen plenty of evidence already the taxpayers would lose significantly more by logging in these old growth areas that are harder to access and have been protected by the Roadless Rule,” Hanna said earlier this month.

The losses happen because the Forest Service actually pays for building new roads used by the timber industry to log public lands. In relatively remote areas with old growth stands of trees, she says, the costs to the public are even higher.

“So, taxpayers are upside down and underwater on the timber sales,” she added.

The Forest Service’s final environmental impact statement runs to nearly 700 pages. And critics have already seized upon one passage that downplays any impact to climate change. It says more logging would have only “a temporary influence on atmospheric carbon concentrations” that would get better as the forest grew back.

“Yeah, I don’t buy it,” said Dominick DellaSalla, an Oregon-based researcher with Wild Heritage, an advocacy group. “And I think they’re kicking the can down the road, there’s a lot more impacts that are going to happen.”

DellaSalla has advocated for transitioning Tongass timber harvests to secondary growth. He says the Tongass is a vast carbon sink as other forests in the Pacific Northwest are lost to development and more recently, wildfire.

“We’ve got to recognize that every action has a reaction in terms of the atmosphere,” DellaSalla told CoastAlaska. “And to deny that, the Forest Service is really denying climate change.”

Under the federal government’s rule-making process, the Secretary of Agriculture has to wait 30 days from releasing its formal “record of decision.” That’s what makes the rule binding. A future presidential administration could work to change that, but it would have to go through this multi-year rule-making process from scratch.

Agency’s 2016 Tongass forest plan limits old growth logging

But there’s another piece to the Tongass logging debate. The amount of old growth timber that can be cut is restricted by the Tongass forest plan that sets out a transition to young growth over 15 years.

Gov. Bill Walker’s administration petitioned for the Roadless Rule to be rolled back in 2018. But the state didn’t stop there: it also called on the federal government to revise the 2016 forest plan that limits old growth timber harvests.

“There was a request for revision of the 2016 plan,” said Clark, the natural resources attorney in Juneau. “There’s been absolutely no movement on that by the Forest Service or anybody else”

That would be an entirely different fight.

“Rulemaking takes a long time,” Clark said. “And this one would be, I think, more difficult than what we did on the Roadless exemption.”

In other words, the fight over old growth logging in Tongass National Forest is a conflict that moves about as swiftly as the trees grow.

The Roadless Rule debate for the Tongass National Forest has been going on since before social media websites even existed. But today, it’s not uncommon to scroll past conversations about the sweeping policy changes on Facebook or Instagram. In a push to get the word out before the Trump Administration makes a final decision, young, Indigenous leaders in Alaska and elsewhere are making that content extremely sharable.

Even if you’re not aware of the contentious, ongoing Roadless Rule debate, you’ve probably heard of Vogue, the high-end fashion magazine. Now, imagine combining the two: a Vogue cover with dense federal policy. 

Marina Anderson is the Tribal Administrator at the Organized Village of Kasaan, and she’s on that reimagined cover of Vogue, which includes headlines about real ordeals tribal governments have faced. It’s posted to her Instagram page. 

“Right Across the top in capital letters it says, ‘Vogue,’” she said. “And we have Vogue Tongass, and it’s called the Landback Issue.” 

Anderson isn’t the first person to use a mockup of a Vogue cover to make a point. A black, Oslo-based student started the #VogueChallenge over the summer to promote more diversity on the magazine’s covers, which have been photographed mostly by white males. Anderson says she’s been meaning to write a thank you note for the inspiration. 

She thought this approach could also be used to educate people about problems at home. 

“So immediately it’s able to draw somebody in because it’s something we’re familiar with, which is Vogue,” Anderson said.

Depending on how closely you keep up with the news, you might be aware of the major management changes underway in the Tongass National Forest. 

In 2018, the State of Alaska petitioned the United States Department of Agriculture for an exemption to the Roadless Rule. That would mean the rule that prohibits road building elsewhere on national forest land wouldn’t apply to the Tongass. Proponents say the exemption could open up access to logging and other activities. 

But lots of people, from commercial fishermen to tribal governments, have voiced strong opposition. There are concerns about what this could mean for deer and salmon habit and climate change mitigation. Recently, nine tribal governments requested another federal process to establish a Traditional Homelands Conservation Rule. The idea is to protect important areas for Tlingit, Haida and Tsimshian peoples. 

All of this is complicated, and that’s where the Vogue cover fits in. 

“I’ve been hearing that because it was catchy and easy to follow along with the Vogue covers on social media, they were finally ready to learn about it,” Anderson said.

Several Indigenous leaders and social media influencers have joined the cause, sharing their own Vogue Tongass covers. The posts are linked to a website that helps people generate letters to their local elected officials and the Secretary of the USDA. 

“A priority of the campaign was to be able to reach young people to keep the momentum up,” Anderson said. “A lot of us have a big large web, and we have the know-how to click fast on these little phones and make things happen.”

Richard Peterson, the President of the Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska, has been following the proposed changes to the Roadless Rule closely for a long time, but he only recently learned about a Tongass edition of Vogue. 

“I had many people reach out and say, ‘hey, where’s your Vogue cover?’ And I was like what?”

Peterson now has his own Vogue Tongass cover, which he posted on Instagram. He says he was delighted to see this innovative way of getting the message across.

“I think a lot of people really don’t understand what the tribes’ concerns are right now,” Peterson said. “I think that’s how we can start the conversation.”

Marina Anderson thinks that’s a conversation young people should be prepared to have. The Roadless Rule has been an ongoing topic in Alaska for decades, and the debate doesn’t seem to be going away. 

“If we’re going to have to fight this fight in another 10 years, we’re going to need these people ready,” she said.

So far, she says 500 people have submitted letters supporting tribal governments.