“It’s like walking into one of the most beautiful cathedrals you’ll ever see in the world.” That’s how President Joel Jackson of the Organized Village of Kake described the Tongass National Forest at last week’s Roadless Rally in Juneau.
But once again, the Tongass — America’s largest national forest, and one that protects nearly three-quarters of Southeast Alaska — is under threat.
In the name of wildfire prevention and economic development, the Trump administration is taking aim at the 2001 Roadless Rule, a landmark policy that has protected Alaska’s fishing, tourism, and sustainable harvest industries for decades.
Over the last 25 years, Tongass National Forest has been an unfortunate and undeserved political lightning rod for partisan politics. First issued by President Clinton, this ruling prevented further roadbuilding through the country’s remaining undeveloped national forest lands. In practice, it virtually ended all logging and land leasing for coal, gas, oil, and mineral development on those lands inaccessible by existing road infrastructure.
Since then, protections for Tongass National Forest have swung from one end of the pendulum to the other with each successive federal administration: enacted by Clinton, rescinded by Bush, partially restored by Obama, rescinded again by Trump, then re-established by Biden. And now, despite the clear voice of the public, back and forth, the pendulum continues to swing.
When President Clinton first issued the Roadless Area Conservation Policy directive, it received more than 1.6 million comments from the public. A monumental 90% of these comments favored protecting the country’s wild areas from development. The message was clear: across the aisle, people were in favor of keeping these spaces wild.
Typically, a federal agency would allow a standard 60 days for public comment. The original Roadless Area Rule took two years to engage with more than 600 public hearings. This is all in direct contradiction to the measly 21-day comment period recently put forward in the face of new changes.
Despite the compressed timeline, 625,737 comments were submitted over the last three weeks. Similar to those submitted during the 2020 Trump administration rollback, of which 96% of the nearly 500,000 comments advocated to keep inventoried areas roadless, 99.2% are in support of keeping these areas wild. Once again, the mandate is overwhelmingly clear: keep these areas protected. Unfortunately, in 2020, the federal government disregarded the outcome of the public comment period by opening these lands for development. Now, with a nearly unanimous consensus from over 625,000 people, hopefully, things will be different.
“In the last frontier of Southeast Alaska [in 2019], 96% of the local respondents favored keeping the Roadless Rule intact,” said Captain Dan Blanchard, CEO of UnCruise Adventures, at the Juneau rally. “We the people have to make the ‘we the people’ known to the [federal government] that [want] to take us back to a dark day.”
The cost of clearcutting
It’s very difficult to overstate the severity of this rollback. This rescission would open up nearly 45 million acres of the approximately 60 million acres of inventoried roadless areas within the National Forest System, with 9.3 million acres of these areas located within the Tongass National Forest. This is a swath of wilderness directly responsible for nearly $2 billion annually in the form of tourism and commercial fishing here in Southeast Alaska.
“A few logging jobs for a few years is somehow meant to justify scars we will never see heal in our lifetimes,” said Malachi Thorrington, a certified hunting guide, commercial fisherman and lifelong Alaskan. “As we witnessed in decades past, industrial logging jobs in the Tongass are temporary, a flash in the pan for a few, usually not even resident Alaskans.”
A USDA press release notes that the rescission would support President Trump’s Executive Order 14153: Unleashing Alaska’s Extraordinary Resource Potential. The Federal Register backs this up, saying: “The President declared that the United States’ national and economic security are currently threatened by our Nation’s reliance upon foreign timber, energy and mineral production, and that it is imperative for the United States to take immediate action to facilitate domestic production of these natural resources to the maximum possible extent.”
Concerning as it may be, the solution to America’s reliance on imports is not hiding in Tongass National Forest. The numbers clearly indicate that commercial logging in Tongass is a financial sinkhole. According to Taxpayers for Common Sense, since 1980, the U.S. Forest Service has lost an average of $44 million per year on Tongass timber sales. The logistics of commercial logging are infeasible in Tongass: between road construction and maintenance; transport and harvest of materials into and out of remote areas; seasonality of the work; and distance to processing mills, the cost of commercial timber harvesting in this region adds up extremely fast.
What is the cost the federal government is willing to enact in order to “facilitate domestic production” of commercial-scale timber from Tongass National Forest? The tens of millions of dollars to be lost annually will be just the tip of the iceberg in comparison to the billion-dollar impacts this scale of ecosystem devastation will have on the tourism and fishing industries in Southeast Alaska.
“It is estimated that the Tongass provides Southeast Alaska communities with $2 billion each year from the fishing and visitor industries, supporting 16,500 jobs,” Kate Troll, a former member of the Tongass Advisory Committee, said on stage. “If doing right by our economy was the real objective, we wouldn’t be having this debate. If facts really mattered, the Trump administration would realize there is absolutely no overall economic benefit to be gained by tossing the Roadless Rule out.”
Juneau gathers
The response in Juneau last week was the same as it was in 2019: a rally took place under the shadow of Takhu amid song, salmon posters, and rallying cries for the ecosystems in this region. For some, it felt like déjà vu.
“We’ve been fighting this battle ever since the time of Governor Egan,” said Seikoonie Fran Houston, the tribal representative for the Áakʼw Ḵwáan. “What do we get out of it? […] We don’t get no more fish, we can’t hunt, everything. We can’t do any of that anymore, because construction will be happening.”
These trees, some of which can live to be over 1000 years old, have stood through it all. Seedlings during the Byzantine Empire and Song Dynasty, they first sprouted out of the soil long before any Western settler ever thought to meander across the Atlantic. They’ve been witness to generations of Alaska Native families: to hundreds of years worth of births, deaths, and celebrations. They’ve stood witness as settlers entered the mix: to generations more of Western births, deaths, changes, and celebrations. They were there when the fur traders came; when the miners came; when the loggers came; and, now, as they try to come back.
They survived the industrial-scale logging of the 80s and 90s. Perhaps they stretched in relief when the Roadless Rule was first enacted in 2001. They’ve stood watch every time this rule has been under siege – watching with the same patience they’ve held for 1000 years. Now they watch as it is threatened again.
What’s important here is that they’re still standing. Regardless of the direction the federal government goes, last weekend proved that these trees are not standing alone. Over 100 people gathered in Alaska’s capital at a rally organized by the Southeast Alaska Conservation Council to repeat what the people have said since 2001: keep these lands wild.
Amidst a political climate ripping us into two factions, the consensus of the rally was that protecting wilderness areas is a fundamentally non-partisan decision. If the results of the Roadless Rule public comment periods over the last 25 years tell us anything, it’s that Americans are willing to come together to protect our few remaining wild spaces.
“In the last frontier, industrial clear-cut logging will be subsidized by you and me: US taxpayers,” said Blanchard. “There’s no way that these companies can get in and cut and make a dime unless they’re federally supported through discounted lumber auctions and the [federal government] building the infrastructure. So tell me, any of you that are fiscally conservative like me, who in the heck [wants to support] private business that can’t clear cut on its own?”
His thoughts were echoed by Troll who broke down the basic economics of the situation: in 2024 the seafood and tourism industries generated 26% of the wages in Southeast Alaska. Compare this to old growth logging, which made up less than 1% of wages, it’s clear that the economic stability in this region relies on intact ecosystems.
Over the course of the rally, Prince of Wales, the most heavily logged island in the Tongass, was brought up as an example of what stands to happen if we move forward with more clearcutting.
“The trees are so close together that I can barely fit between them, they’re more like prison bars than a forest,” said Thorrington. “The Tongass was and still is being industrially clear cut and left to rot [with] no replanting [and] no thinning. This is everlasting evidence of laziness and greed. If you need to cut trees, there are dramatically better ways to do it, and none of them require repealing the Roadless Rule.”
What awaits these ecosystems, economies, and communities in the face of industrial logging will be nothing short of devastating. According to Troll, roads with blocked culverts impact more than 240 miles of salmon streams – costing salmon fishermen $2.5 million per year. The fact is that rescinding the Roadless Rule is bad politics, bad economics, and bad representation of what the overwhelming majority of people want. For once, we are looking down the barrel at a rare non-partisan issue, and the desire is crystal-clear: leave our wild lands as they are.
“It seems like every time we have a win there comes another lawsuit, but we will stand. We’ll continue to stand because this is our homeland. This is our home,” said President Jackson. “The Tongass is our home to the Tlingit, Haida and Tsimshian people, and we will protect it.”
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.
