Alaska Rainforest Defenders is the region’s strongest voice for protecting Southeast Alaska’s forests and the fish and wildlife habitat and subsistence opportunities they harbor.
Defenders Submit Comments on Alaska Roadless Rulemaking
TAKE ACTION NOW – ROADLESS RULE EXEMPTION
In October, the Forest Service released its Tongass Roadless Exemption Draft Environmental Impact Statement with six alternatives. All but the first, No Action alternative would gut current roadless areas, but the last one is the agency's preferred alternative and intends to completely abolish the Tongass National Forest from the 2001 Roadless Rule.
ACTION ALERT: Comment Period for the Central Tongass "Project"
The heart of the Tongass is threatened by the Central Tongass Project. Please take a stand before the September 16th deadline.
We urge you to submit written comments or testify on the CTP Draft EIS during the 45-day comment period, ending at midnight on September 16, 2019. Download the Defender’s action alert for more information and talking points.
Northern Kupreanof Island. Photo: Colin Arisman.
The comment period is now open on the Forest Service’s proposed Central Tongass Project (CTP) Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS). In truth, the project is a huge timber sale and road construction boondoggle. We ask you to submit comments requesting selection of the no-action alternative and cessation of any further planning for this destructive project.
If approved, the Forest Service would provide the timber industry with nearly a quarter billion board feet of primarily old-growth and some second-growth timber, on up to 13,500 acres of logging units, to be cut over the next 15 years. This devastation would occur on Mitkof, Kupreanof, Kuiu, Wrangell, Zarembo and Etolin Islands and the adjacent mainland.
The forest landscape in this part of the Tongass is already heavily fragmented, both naturally and from decades of industrial scale logging. The logging activity would include construction of about 118 miles of new logging roads, despite the project area already having almost 1,200 miles1 of poorly maintained national forest roads. In an attempt to sell this travesty to the public, the Forest Service has packaged this destructive activity with a minor amount of largely unfunded recreation improvements and watershed restoration—and have innocuously labeled it a "project" instead of a "timber sale project."
WAYS TO SUBMIT COMMENTS OR TESTIFY
Comments can be submitted by these means:
Online at: https://cara.ecosystem-management.org/Public/CommentInput?project=53098
By FAX to: (907) 772-5995
By email to: commentsalaska-tongass-petersburg@fs.fed.us