As the 2024 presidential campaign progressed, many minds around here in Southeast Alaska were especially attune to the environmental agenda of the candidates. There’s no doubt that the health of Tongass National Forest, a lightning rod for political contention over the last 20 years, is directly tied to the mental and physical health of each and every person that lives in this region. From the food sources that people have depended on here for over 10,000 years to those that make up the major parts of our state’s current economy, threats to Tongass destabilize our most fundamental needs as a community.
“Our way of life is the land and the water,” said Joel Jackson, President of the Organized Village of Kake. “It’s so important to keep those old growth trees in place because it enables our people to continue our traditional, customary way of life.”
In 2001, the National Roadless Area Conservation Rule (Roadless Rule) designated 55% of Tongass to be roadless areas that would preserve ecosystem health, maintain watershed viability, and serve as recreation and tourism space.
With this month’s re-election of Trump, however, there’s the potential for severe rollbacks on many existing climate and environmental policies such as the Roadless Rule. If his first stint in office (during which he rolled back more than 100 environmental regulations) is any indication, his second term has the potential to be the nail in the coffin for any hope of putting an end to the emissions feeding planetary warming. A state that is already warming multiple times faster than the rest of the globe, Alaska is at risk of increased landslides, declining fish harvests, and major ecosystem shifts as warming continues.
“If we’re to believe what’s written in Project 2025 it clearly states in plain English that they would reinstate Trump’s 2020 Alaska Roadless Rule, which would open up vast areas of the Tongass National Forest to development,” said Nathan Newcomer, the Federal Campaigns Manager at the Southeast Alaska Conservation Council (SEACC). “You’re talking about clear-cut logging and infrastructure projects that would have huge impacts on biodiversity and the livelihoods of communities that depend on these ecosystems. You’re talking about impacts to rivers, to streams, to salmon.”
With more roads can come more logging, something that seems to be a driving force of Trump’s Roadless Rule. Further in the same section, Project 2025 states that “logging has been shut down to the extent that New York harvests more timber than does all of Alaska.”
The romanticized notion that Alaska is as a source of endless, untapped resources, however, is not nearly as black-and-white as it is made out to be.
“The logging industry in Southeast Alaska has really changed over the last several decades,” Newcomer said. “Basically, you have mostly small mill operators that are harvesting second growth trees, and the Forest Service has made this transition to doing younger harvesting and not targeting old growth forests. The infrastructure is just not here anymore. […] I think that’s a false suggestion that there is an untapped economic market here. People have moved on, mostly.”
Lack of infrastructure among other factors like changes in the global timber markets, the type of wood available here, Southeast Alaska’s distance from markets, and road construction costs, have actually made large-scale commercial harvesting extremely costly. What is pitched by Project 2025 to be an effort to increase revenue has actually been proven as the opposite when it comes to commercial logging operations here. Changes have been seen in the timber market of this region because, as a SEACC press release states, “over the last 40 years USFS timber sales here have cost taxpayers over $1.7 billion — averaging losses of $635 for every thousand board feet (mbf) of timber sold.” During Trump’s last rollback of this rule, of the nearly half a million comments received by the public only 1% supported the rollback, with 96% advocating to keep the inventoried areas roadless.
“There’s a whole report that was done on just the road maintenance issues here in Southeast Alaska, and how much money the federal government wasted. I mean, basically tax dollar money that was wasted to log old growth,” Newcomer said.
Beyond the economic side of things, more devastating is the impact further development of the Tongass would have on the Alaska Native people for whom the forest is home.
“We’ve always been the people of the Tongass,” said Joel Jackson. “We grew up depending on the old growth forests and all the animals and everything that lived. There are medicines, our berries, everything. It’s very important to our way of life.”
Jackson has been at the forefront of discussions around the Tongass for years and has seen first-hand the devastating effects that have come from previous commercial logging operations.
“They basically had industrial logging,” Jackson said. “That means they cut down everything, didn’t matter if it was good or bad and left the trees out on the land that they didn’t want. That caused a lot of problems with the erosion into the streams where our salmon come, and [industrial logging] raised the temperature of the stream.”
Threats to salmon threaten the staple food source of many communities in this area. Jackson said jeopardizing salmon runs can run the risk of devastation across different industries.
“I always put subsistence first [however] there’s charter boats and commercial fishing [that depend on salmon],” he said. “That’s going to affect millions of jobs, right? It’s a short term, short sighted way of making money.”
Not all lumber harvesting throughout the Tongass, however, is harmful. Gordon Chew is the owner of a sustainably run, local mill in Tenakee that gives a living example of what timber harvesting should look like.
“Our approach has always been selective, and that’s partly because we live in the largest intact temperate rainforest on the planet.” Chew said. “We don’t want to be a part of any environmental destruction.”
Chew doesn’t seem too concerned about how another Trump presidency might impact Tongass.
“We’re pretty much sold on a sustainable approach to the forest and I don’t think that’s going to really change with Trump,” Chew said. “It didn’t last time. What happened last time, of course, was the Roadless Rule was rescinded, but what happened in four years was nothing, and there’s no large timber industries here waiting to take down the forest.”
Chew echoes much of what Newcomer had to say about labor, namely that there’s not the infrastructure here to operate large-scale logging operations.
“There’s nobody here to do that,” Chew said. “Nobody wants to do that. Even the Native corporations are moving away from it and they’re going to carbon credits. I think there’s a general change in everything but the larger operators here in the forest whose businesses depend on mass extraction. I understand, and I’m sympathetic with them too, but that’s not what I’ve seen happen here, and that’s not what we’re doing.”
If timber harvesting doesn’t drive potential new road construction, however, Chew expressed concern over pollution from mining operations.
“These international corporations, like the ones that want to open up Pebble Mine, they’ve got tremendous equity and backing with tons of money. They can lobby and then they can do huge pit mines, or whatever,” Chew said. “So that’s more my fear, because there is no one sitting around here waiting for the Roadless Rule to go away, right? And it’s not that I’m against roads. I mean, I am in that [I ask myself]: what’s going to come down the road? It’s probably going to be mining trucks taking minerals out of the ground and threatening the salmon.”
Whether it’s logging or mining, any further development of extractive industries throughout the Tongass that might come as a result of a rollback of the Roadless Rule threaten the very way of life in this region.
“We’ve lived here for 10,000 years or more, and the way things are going now, and the way people are looking at the extraction of all our resources, I kind of look at it as continued genocide of our Native people,” Jackson said.
Further extraction means further threats to salmon and for Alaska Native people, Jackson shares that “[salmon] is our connection to the land and the waters, and it feeds our people. If that is gone, then we’re going to be forced to … you know, I don’t even want to think about [what would happen] if we lost our salmon.”
Rachel Levy is a Juneau-based photojournalist whose work culminates at the intersections of environmental justice, arts and culture, and sustainable tourism. A 2022 graduate of Harvard University's Environmental Policy program, she is also the director of the award-winning documentary "Hidden in Plain Sight" that exposes the labor exploitation and colonial framework burdening Tanzania's safari industry.
