By GARLAND KENNEDY
Sentinel Staff Writer
Concern for the future of land use and environmental protections in the Tongass National Forest with the revocation of the 2001 Roadless Rule was the focus of the Southeast Alaska Subsistence Regional Advisory Council at its meeting Wednesday.
The council met by teleconference and included members from across Southeast Alaska.
Tongass Forest Supervisor Earl Stewart summarized the impact of exempting the Tongass from the Roadless Rule. He said ending the Roadless Rule in the Tongass will “redesignate as suitable for timber production lands which are currently deemed unsuitable solely due to the implementation of the 2001 rule. Under the full exemption this would include approximately 168,000 acres of old growth and 20,000 acres of young growth,” Stewart said.
He claimed that the Forest Service remains dedicated to the 2016 Tongass forest plan.
“We are focused on implementing the 2016 Tongass Land Management Plan. And at this time we have no plan to undertake the NEPA process for the plan revision or amendment. The 2016 Plan implements a transition which provides for old growth bridge timber sale opportunities until a majority of the Tongass timber program can be offered as young growth sales. The Alaska Roadless Rulemaking decision does not automatically authorize any specific action. Projects will still need to comply with the 2016 Tongass Land and Resource Plan and be analyzed,” Stewart said.
NEPA is the National Environmental Policy Act, which requires consideration of the possible environmental impacts of some federal actions.
RAC Chairman Donald Hernandez, of Point Baker, argued that the end of the Roadless Rule would lead to environmental destruction in sensitive areas.
“The (2016) Forest Plan called for several hundred million board feet of timber to be cut before the plan was supposed to transition to second growth and one of the big problems that I saw... It was very difficult to find enough old growth timber here on Prince of Wales to meet the needs of that forest plan. They’re really going to have to start compromising some areas that a lot of people felt are very important to protect for watersheds, for fisheries, for deer habitat, and you didn’t implement a lot of the wolf protection measures that were recommended, because it would make it difficult to find the timber to meet that several hundred million board foot goal,” Hernandez said.
The chairman expressed doubt in the truth of Steward’s statement that the 2016 forest plan will remain intact. Hernandez said that the push to end the Roadless Rule in Alaska is a result of pressure from the top.
“It is still an open question in my mind whether this whole transition is going to take place to second growth. Boy, there is an awful lot of pressure not to move in that direction. That’s the whole impetus behind this roadless change. You (Stewart) might come before us and say, ‘We’re sticking to the forest plan,’ but if you talk with our congressional representatives or talk to our governor’s office, their goal is to increase the logging on the Tongass National Forest.
“And all the governor had to do was put in a call to the Secretary (of Agriculture Sonny Perdue) and ask to get rid of the Roadless Rule and it’s gone. So there is no comfort that this forest plan that we are operating under right now won’t be amended or scrapped or in another ten years a new forest plan comes out and all of a sudden these 168,000 acres of old growth are part of the allowable sale quantity and we’ll start laying out timber sales,” he said.
In 2017, Alaska’s U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski added a rider to an appropriations bill that would end the 2016 Tongass transition plan, the Washington Post reported in November of that year. Despite this effort, the 2016 plan remains in place today.
Hernandez concluded that logging in formerly roadless areas could begin once the rule was gone.
“You could go through the NEPA process and you could be cutting old growth in these newly available previously roadless acres here in the foreseeable future,” he said.
“It’s hard for me to give any kind of projection... it would still have to meet and fulfill the requirements of the 2016 Land and Resource Management Plan and an individual and separate NEPA decision,” Stewart said.
But Hernandez expressed doubt that the 2016 forest plan will prevent logging in formerly roadless areas.
“In all the testimony that we heard on the Roadless Rule during the environmental impact statement process it was portrayed to the public that implementing the full exemption of the Roadless Rule would not change the forest plan. And I think that gave people the impression that the logging was still going to happen in areas that were designated for timber production in that first plan, which of course excluded all of the roadless areas. So to tell people that it wouldn’t change the forest plan, the logging was still going to happen where it showed in the forest plan. It just doesn’t seem to be true, because if it were to be put into the available sale quantity it is available for timber harvest,” Hernandez said.
Stewart said he didn’t know what would occur as a result of the end of roadless protections.
“I just can’t foresee what the future answer is on some of these elements … This is not a decision that I make,” the supervisor said.
Council member Frank Wright, of Hoonah, spoke about recent changes in NEPA which came from the White House in July. Wright suggested that President Trump’s loosening of NEPA regulations may have been connected to the roadless rulemaking process.
Wright suggested that there may have been a plan to simultaneously end the Roadless Rule and weaken NEPA protections.
“You don’t know if the new NEPA policy was for the Roadless Rule. Because if that is what it was, there was a plan before it came into effect,” Wright said.
Steward denied that the two are linked.
“I don’t see them as connected actions. I see them as two different processes,” he said.
The recent NEPA changes, in part, mean that the cumulative environmental impacts of industrial projects no longer need to be considered as they were before, the New York Times wrote on July 15.
“In one of the most bitterly contested provisions, the rule would free federal agencies from having to consider the impacts of infrastructure projects on climate change. It does so by eliminating the need for agencies to analyze a project’s indirect or ‘cumulative’ effects on the environment and specifying that they are required to only analyze ‘reasonably foreseeable’ impacts,” the Times said.
Back on the conference call, the chairman told Stewart that he took no comfort in Forest Service promises.
“I understand your answer but it is not very comforting. Some of these roadless areas have been relied on as kind of a refuge for wildlife that isn’t as impacted as it is in the rest of the forest, and I don’t know. We still don’t want to see some of these areas impacted by logging and it sure sounds to me like they could be… I’m just going to express the feeling that I know a lot of people are feeling and we’re not getting any comfort from what you’re telling us right now. I just feel I need to say that,” Hernandez said.
Regarding public opinion on the end of the Roadless Rule, during the USFS public scoping period, 96% of 267,000 public comments expressed support for keeping roadless protections in place in Southeast Alaska. Fewer than 1% of commenters wanted a full exemption from the rule, according to the official USFS summary published in May. The Department of Agriculture’s “Preferred Alternative” is a full exemption. Stewart noted that a final decision on the matter should come from U.S. Department of Agriculture before the end of the month.
Stewart did not reply to the chairman’s concerns.
“I appreciate your comments and considerations there, sir,” he said.
