❌LOGGING in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest ❌
The Wilderness Society
You’ve seen the harrowing photos of trees in the Amazon going up in flames. You’ve probably even heard about the outsize importance of the rainforest as a home to Indigenous communities, refuge for biodiversity and major tool in the fight against climate change, magnifying the tragedy of the fires still sweeping through the Brazilian countryside.
But what you may not have known is that America has its own lesser-known version of the Amazon in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, the largest temperate rainforest on the planet. Or that President Trump just took a huge step toward eliminating protections for it, potentially kicking off another series of environmental disasters.
For nearly 20 years, a policy known as the “roadless rule” has protected the very wildest parts of the Tongass and other national forests from logging. On Wednesday, Trump ordered to exclude Tongass National Forest from that rule and open it up to exploitation.
Tongass is an ecologically rich haven of bears, moose and centuries-old evergreens. Its old-growth trees are unusually efficient at trapping carbon from the atmosphere, leading some to call the Tongass America’s insurance policy against climate change.
Logging in Tongass National Forest would:
- Devastate this delicate landscape and release a huge amount of carbon pollution into the atmosphere
- Decimate the salmon that flourish in the forest’s rivers
- Make the forest more vulnerable to big wildfires in the future
We must protect Tongass National Forest. With fires burning in Brazil and a cascade of threats facing the climate and life as we know it, it’s clear we’ve reached a tipping point.
The Wilderness Society <member@tws.org>