A Crossroads for Wilderness

Dombeck's rule made eminent economic sense. Road construction is the main reason the Forest Service loses money when it sells the public's timber, thereby requiring us to pay cash for the privilege of having our trees removed, our soil ripped up, our water degraded, and our fish and wildlife sacrificed. Moreover, roadless areas are roadless for a reason: Industry hadn't wanted the timber because it was difficult to access or wasn't worth much. In fact, the national forests themselves were acquired because the timber industry hadn't wanted them. Even today, after the industry has skimmed the best logs from its own holdings, the national forests produce only 5 percent of America's wood fiber.

In 1999, as per requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act, the Forest Service solicited public commentary on its roadless rule, eventually hosting 600 meetings and hearings in 37 states, getting inundated with the greatest outpouring of public support in the nation's rule-making history. In all, the Forest Service has received more than 2 million comments from people who say they want their roadless areas permanently protected; that's eight times the number who made themselves heard either way in the next most commented-on rule, the organic food standards of 2000. So overwhelming was support for the Tongass that, to the horror of the Alaska delegation, it was included in the final rule. Then George W. Bush was elected president.

Overturning the roadless rule would have been politically dangerous. Instead, Bush strategists set about killing it by a thousand cuts. First, they announced a 60-day delay. Then they took a dive in court. At his confirmation hearings, Attorney General John Ashcroft had pledged to defend the roadless rule as the "law of the land." "I will, regardless of whether or not I supported something as a senator, defend the rule," he had testified under oath. But, at the very first opportunity Ashcroft broke his word, refusing to defend the roadless rule against lawsuits brought in U.S. District Court in Idaho by Boise Cascade and the state of Idaho; in fact, the Justice Department aided and abetted the plaintiffs by expressing sympathy for their concerns. On May 10, 2001, two days before the roadless rule would have been law, the judge halted it with a preliminary injunction, citing as a reason the government's support for the plaintiffs' position. The decision is being appealed by the environmental groups that had intervened in the case. The 4,650 miles of oads already cut into the Tongass have allowed heavy logging equipment deep into the forest. Until recently, the bulk of the resulting timber was pulped at the Ketchikan Pulp Company mill.

In July 2001, with the preliminary injunction in place, the Forest Service opened a new public comment period, this time seeking answers to 10 loaded timber-industry questions the administration called "reasonable concerns." (Of the 674,008 comments, 652,121 were in favor of roadless protection.) That same month the agency issued an "interim directive," announcing the administration's intention to let local Forest Service bureaucrats decide whether or not they wanted to protect roadless areas. Now, if protection happened to be what they hankered for, they wouldn't be able to shrug and cite federal law; instead they'd have to sit down with politically well-connected timber executives, look them in the eye, and say, "Sorry, I've decided you can't cut." Local decision making is precisely why the national forests have 386,000 miles of roads.

The directive also removed 12 national forests from roadless protection (including the Tongass, which, on the strength of public comment, the Clinton administration had reinstated after the initial exemption). Suddenly, the woods around Port Houghton and 29 other roadless areas where Tongass timber sales had been planned were back on the block. As of old, the three men of Alaska's congressional delegation, not the American people, were calling the shots.

On September 20, 2001, under the cover of the terrorist attacks, the Bush administration stepped up its assault by proposing to exempt certain activities in roadless areas from environmental review. Then, in December, it issued a directive that relaxed road—construction standards for roadless areas.

To lead the Forest Service, the Bush administration had chosen Dale Bosworth-an agency professional with a respectable environmental record who excels at following orders and who had worked for Dombeck, doing his bidding to manage for fish and wildlife as well as timber. But now Bosworth is following the orders of his immediate supervisor, former timber lobbyist Mark Rey, who continues to represent the timber industry as Agriculture's undersecretary for natural resources and environment. Rey has also worked as an aide to Alaska Senator Frank Murkowski, helping him keep the clearcutters and road builders busy in the Tongass.

At the bidding of the timber industry and its allies, the Bush administration wrote draft regulations for national forests, which, in the summer of 2001, found their way into the hands of the environmental community. Existing regulations had required ecological sustainability as the cornerstone of management, the idea being that whatever product you take from a forest-oil, minerals, wood fiber, fish, wildlife-can't come at the permanent expense of functioning ecosystems. In the draft regulations that requirement was dropped, replaced by one that put economic and social considerations on an equal footing with ecological sustainability, thereby creating an opportunity for bureaucrats to decide what species the public can get along without.

It was Dombeck, not Bush, Rey, and Bosworth, who veered from tradition. For example, in 1954 the federal government had cut a deal with Ketchikan Pulp Company to feed it 8.25 billion board feet of sharply discounted Tongass timber over the next half century. Three years later it cut a deal with the Japanese-owned Alaska Pulp Corporation to feed it 5 billion board feet over the same penod. The result was some of the worst forest abuse in U.S. history. Wildlife habitat in parts of the Tongass unraveled in a maze of new roads; old growth was stripped from valleys and mountainsides; broken earth bled into newly shadeless salmon and steelhead streams. Tongass old growth—which had once provided wood for violins, grand pianos, and other products that can't be made with anything else—got ground up for cellophane.

The discounts guaranteed by the two contracts and an automatic $40 million-a-year government-provided subsidy for road building and sales operations caused the Tongass to lose more money on timber sales than any other national forest. But even with the gifts showered on them by taxpayers, the two pulp companies saw fit to collude on bidding and conspire to fix prices, thereby forcing small logging operations out of business. According to court documents issued in 1981, 102 independent logging and milling companies were forced to bankruptcy, or otherwise driven from the logging business by Ketchikan Pulp and Alaska Pulp. "With a drop of the executioner's sword," found the court, "the defendants could cut off a logger's financing, force the logger out of business, and acquire the company or its assets." In addition, the federal government reported that Ketchikan Pulp and Alaska Pulp had defrauded it to the tune of at least $76.5 million by falsifying data. As a result, no one really knows how much timber has been removed from the Tongass.