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 acing its final months in office, the Bush Administration is racing to give industry access to vast, unspoiled swaths of our national forest system for large-scale logging, roadbuilding and other destructive development. As part of this last-ditch effort, the administration has announced a plan to open up millions of acres of the Tongass Rainforest -- America's largest national forest -- to the timber industry. The 17-million-acre Tongass, an awe-inspiring landscape of ice-capped peaks, glacial fjords, fog-shrouded islands and towering groves of old-growth spruce and hemlock, is home to our nation's biggest populations of salmon, grizzly bears and bald eagles. "The Bush Administration's disastrous plan would squander millions in taxpayer dollars to fund the destruction of some of America's most outstanding wildlife habitat," said Niel Lawrence, director of NRDC's forest project.
More than half of the lands in the U.S. national forest system are already open to development and roadbuilding. Nonetheless, the Bush Administration has tried for years to throw open the last undeveloped expanses of our wild forests to timber companies. Having failed to jettison outright the popular "roadless rule" that bans logging and other development in some 58 million unspoiled acres of national forests, the administration is now targeting specific wildlands for the chainsaw and bulldozer. NRDC is mobilizing our Members and online activists to protest proposed logging in unroaded backcountry areas of Colorado and Idaho, as well as in Alaska's Tongass, and we will go to court if necessary to block these reckless assaults on our wild forest heritage. In 2005, NRDC won a federal court order rejecting the administration's previous management plan for the Tongass because, among other problems, it rationalized the opening up of wildlands based on grossly overstated demand for Tongass timber. A new plan was supposed to correct those defects, but it simply reiterates the senseless call to sacrifice pristine areas to logging and road construction at taxpayer expense.
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“The Bush Administration's disastrous plan would squander millions in taxpayer dollars to fund the destruction of some of America's most outstanding wildlife habitat.”
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