In Brief: Earthjustice's involvement with the Tongass actually predates -- and helped inspire -- the creation of our organization. The lawyers who later founded us in 1970 filed the first of many lawsuits to stop plans to clearcut the oldest, biggest, and most valuable trees in the forest.

08/14/07

It was on September 10, 1907, more than 50 years before Alaska became a state, that President Theodore Roosevelt named the Tongass National Forest, the largest national forest in the country. It is an utterly spectacular place -- towering ancient forests of spruce and hemlock, fjords the equal of any in the world, rivers and streams teeming with five species of salmon, and the densest concentrations of bald eagles and grizzly bears in the world.

Earthjustice's involvement with the Tongass actually predates -- and helped inspire -- the creation of our organization. The lawyers who later founded us in 1970 filed the first of many lawsuits to stop plans to clearcut the oldest, biggest, and most valuable trees on Admiralty Island that also provide essential wildlife habitat and recreational possibilities. (Because we protected it, President Carter was able to designate most of the island a national monument in 1978 and Congress could designate those same lands part of the national wilderness system in 1980.)

Forest in the Tongass National Forest

Photo by SEACC

In the mid-seventies, we sent our first lawyer to take up residence in Juneau, which he did on a boat. An actual office was established in 1978 and continues to this day.

And while our lawyers also work to protect the Arctic (both on-shore and off), other special places, and Alaska's wildlife and marine resources, the Tongass remains central to our activities there.

A big problem was two voracious pulp mills, at Ketchikan and Sitka, whose appetites required a vast flow of trees. The only permanent solution to this problem was to get rid of the mills; our litigation successfully challenged much logging proposed under the mill contracts, and they finally shut down in the 1990s.

Long-term relief from endless attempts to log the ancient forest seemed to arrive with the Roadless Area Conservation Rule, which banned road-building and logging on all national forest roadless areas as of early 2000, but the new administration of George W. Bush immediately moved to kill the rule and explicitly took steps to exempt the Tongass from it.

This was a blow, to be sure, but we've so far been able to prevail -- no new timber sales in roadless areas on the Tongass have been logged in the past seven years. The Forest Service plans to announce a new management plan sometime around the Tongass' birthday. Unfortunately, it seems likely that the plan will constitute one massive public subsidy for the timber industry and that we will have to return to court to preserve this irreplaceable treasure intact.

So lift a glass to the centenarian Tongass. It has taken yeoman effort to keep it mostly standing. With the help of people like you, we promise never to let our guard down.

Happy birthday!

Vawter "Buck" Parker, Executive Director
buckparker@earthjustice.org