Appeals Court Rules Against Alaska Timber Industry-Wolves and Taxpayers Benefit
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For decades the timber industry has been destroying old growth forests all over the world, and Alaska’s Tongass National Forest has long been a primary target. The lumber industry recently sought permission from the courts to continue even more aggressive logging by building new roads on 9.5 million acres.
Reprinted with Permission from TakePart.com.
by Emily J. Gertz
A Wednesday court ruling may mean the clock is ticking down on the old-growth logging industry of southeastern Alaska.
On July 29, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit reversed a lower court decision that would have allowed new road building on 9.5 million road-free acres of the 16.9-million-acre Tongass National Forest in Alaska.
The move effectively averted expansion of clear-cut logging on the Tongass, the nation’s largest federally owned forest.
Barring an appeal to the Supreme Court by the state of Alaska, the ruling resolves a court case that began seven years ago, when SEACC and several other organizations contested the Bush administration’s 2003 decision to exempt the Tongass from the Clinton-era “roadless rule” for national forests.
Clear-cutting in the Tongass has degraded habitat of Sitka black-tailed deer, said Marvin. This has contributed to a population crash among the wolves of Prince of Wales Island, whose numbers “are half of what they were last year, which is half of the year before,” said Marvin. In June, Alaska wildlife officials confirmed a steep drop in this wolf population.
The Prince of Wales Island population is part of a unique subspecies of gray wolf found only in Alaska called the Alexander Archipelago wolves. Wildlife advocates have petitioned the Obama administration to extend federal endangered species protections to these wolves.
Further clear-cutting might have also become problematic for thousands of Alaskans who hunt and gather food for their families. “The science shows that the habitat needed by wolves, and the biological interaction between wolves and their prey, involves humans—because we also hunt Sitka black-tailed deer,” said Marvin.
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Circuit Court of Appeals decided Wednesday to keep roads out of roadless areas of the Tongass National Forest over the objections of the state and timber industry, which had challenged the “roadless rule” and its restrictions on logging. The Alaskans who had challenged the rule are calling it a major defeat in their attempt to revive the Southeast Alaska timber industry, or maybe just to keep it alive.
They will appeal this to SCOTUS. These kind of people have lots of money and lots of time and it will be a friendly court given dumbasses like Thomas, and religious nuts like Scalia and Alito are on it.