By GARLAND KENNEDY
Sentinel Staff Writer
U.S. District Judge Sharon Gleason granted a temporary injunction today against U.S. Forest Service plans for a logging project on Prince of Wales Island.
“The injunction blocks an initial sale that would have auctioned off 1,156 acres of old-growth trees,” Earthjustice, an environmental advocacy organization affiliated with the plaintiffs, said in a news release announcing the injunction. “More than 10 miles of new roads would have been constructed along with this sale.”
The plaintiffs include the Southeast Alaska Conservation Council (SEACC), Defenders of Wildlife, the National Audubon Society, Alaska Rainforest Defenders, Alaska Wilderness League and others, who claimed the Forest Service’s environmental impact statement “does not identify individual harvest units; by only identifying broad areas within which harvest may occur, it (USFS) does not fully explain to the public how or where actual timber activities will affect localized habitats.”
The lawsuit, which is still pending, alleges that the Forest Service did not obey federal laws regarding the environmental impact statement for the proposed Prince of Wales Island timber sale, and claims the injunction was necessary due to the potential for “irreparable harm” resulting from the timber sale.
In her ruling today, Judge Gleason, who is based in Anchorage, said, “the balance of harms tips sharply in the plaintiffs’ favor due to the irreparable harm they would suffer in the absence of preliminary injunctive relief.”
The Forest Service argued “that any delay to the Twin Mountain Timber Sale would pose a serious threat to local mills, potentially erasing the market for Tongass old-growth timber.”
The injunction goes into effect immediately. In her notice of the injunction, Gleason said the parties had stipulated that “ground-disturbing activity” in the area of the sale could have begun as early as this Friday, and that “given this immediacy, the court finds that injury to plaintiffs is not speculative.”
Gleason noted that a decision in the underlying lawsuit challenging the timber sale is expected by March 31, 2020.
