Trump administration OKs logging and development in one of the world's largest intact temperate rainforests

Map by Lauren Tierney, The Washington Post; click to enlarge

As of today, the Trump administration has opened up more than half of Alaska's Tongass National Forest to logging and other developments, "stripping protections that had safeguarded one of the world’s largest intact temperate rainforests for nearly two decades," Juliet Eilperin reports for The Washington Post. The decision is "one of the most sweeping public lands rollbacks Trump has enacted" and rolls back protections Bill Clinton enacted in 2001.

Logging companies will be allowed "to build roads and cut and remove timber throughout more than 9.3 million acres of forest — featuring old-growth stands of red and yellow cedar, Sitka spruce and Western hemlock," Eilperin reports. "The relatively pristine expanse is also home to plentiful salmon runs and imposing fjords." The new rule says an additional 188,000 forested acres, mainly old-growth timber, will be made available for logging.

The U.S. Forest Service made the announcement in a Federal Register notice Wednesday.

"For years, federal and academic scientists have identified Tongass as an ecological oasis that serves as a massive carbon sink," Eilperin reports. "Its trees — some of which are between 300 and 1,000 years old — absorb at least 8 percent of all the carbon stored in the entire Lower 48′s forests combined." Dominick DellaSalla, chief scientist with the Earth Island Institute's Wild Heritage project, told Eilperin that "the Tongass is the lungs of North America."

The move highlights the administration's tenuous relationship with environmentalism. "While Trump has repeatedly touted his commitment to planting trees through the One Trillion Tree initiative, invoking it as recently as last week, his administration has sought to expand logging in Alaska and in the Pacific Northwest throughout his presidency," "Eilperin reports. "Federal judges have blocked several of these plans as illegal: Last week, the administration abandoned its appeal of a ruling that struck down a 1.8 million-acre timber sale on the Tongass’s Prince of Wales Island."