We’re spending a lot of time in Alaska these days, probably because the administration is working very hard to make sure everybody can spend a lot of time in Alaska as Alaska always has been. On Tuesday, the administration essentially locked out the massive Pebble Mine project, rescuing the world’s richest salmon fishery. On Wednesday, it virtually locked down the Tongass National Forest against road building and logging. This preserves North America’s largest temperate rainforest. Among its other virtues, the forest is a massive natural carbon capture facility, a bulwark against the climate crisis.
The new rule reinstates protections in the pristine Alaskan back country that were first imposed in 2001 but stripped away by President Donald J. Trump in 2020. Tom Vilsack, the agriculture secretary, said the effort would protect cedar, hemlock and Sitka spruce trees — many of them more than 800 years old — that provide essential habitats for 400 species of wildlife, including bald eagles, salmon and the world’s greatest concentration of black bears. The towering trees also play an essential role in fighting climate change. They store more than 10 percent of the carbon accumulated by all national forests in the United States, according to the government.
As is obvious, the fate of the Tongass has pinballed back and forth depending upon which party happened to sit in the Oval Office. Protections that had been in place for 19 years were eliminated in the last year of Camp Runamuck. Now, they’ve been reinstated again, and good on the administration for doing so. But it’s a tremendously whimsical way of treating an invaluable environmental treasure.
Over at Lawyers, Guns, and Money, Erik Loomis, a historian with a specialty in the environment, specifically in the history of the timber industry in the Northwest, suggests that the president declare Tongass a national monument, thereby putting it further beyond the reach of changeable politics. Like, for example:
Senator Dan Sullivan, the Alaska Republican, called the rule “overly-burdensome,” accused the Biden administration of harming his state’s economy and said he would retaliate by blocking the president’s nominees. “I’ve implored Secretary Vilsack repeatedly to work with us and to not lock up our state,” Mr. Sullivan said in a statement. “My message to hard-working Alaskans who are being crushed and utterly disregarded by this administration: I will fight this decision with everything in my power, including through my Senate oversight responsibilities and by holding relevant nominees wherever possible.”[…]The state’s Republican governor, Mike Dunleavy, said in a statement that the final rule “is a huge loss for Alaskans” and accused the Biden administration of treating his state unfairly. “Alaskans deserve access to the resources that the Tongass provides — jobs, renewable energy resources and tourism, not a government plan that treats human beings within a working forest like an invasive species,” he wrote.
That definition certainly works for me. We’re losing the Amazon rainforest by acres a day because invasive humans are ripping it down to graze their cattle. I’m not sure how roads and logging and a surrender to the extraction industries could ever qualify as boons to tourism. So, lovely—more gridlock. Meanwhile, thanks to this administration, those big old pine trees keep laundering that carbon, and the bears and eagles don’t have to look over their shoulders for a few more years.
Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.
%20|%20#alaska%20|%20#politics){kind=link}