Tongass National Forest

Timber With Roadless Exemption

Issue

The Roadless Area Conservation Final Rule, which prohibits road building and logging within national forest inventoried roadless areas was issued in 2001. Effective January 29, 2004, the Department of Agriculture amended the roadless rule to exempt the Tongass from the prohibitions against timber harvest and road construction in inventoried roadless areas. Management of the Tongass is now guided by the 1997 Revised Tongass Forest Plan.

This exemption was considered necessary to support the communities in Southeast Alaska that depend on the management of national forest lands for social and economic uses vital to community sustainability.

The first timber sales to be issued under the Tongass exemption will be the Three Mile and Gravina sales, with final EISs scheduled for late spring 2004.

Background

On the Tongass National Forest, there are approximately 9.4 million acres of inventoried roadless areas. Of this, 2.5 million acres are in development land use designations. Within the development land use designations, approximately 327,000 acres of the total 676,000 acres of suitable timberland scheduled for harvest are in roadless areas. (These estimates are based on the current 1997 Tongass Revision and are different from those used in the Roadless Rule that used the 1999 Tongass Modified ROD, which was in effect at the time. They are also slightly different from figures found in the SEIS, which uses the most recent information in its analysis).

An injunction on harvesting some sales and preparing new timber sale projects in roadless areas which had been ordered by U.S. District Court Judge James Singleton expired 45 days after a Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement (SEIS) to consider additional wilderness (Sierra Club v. Rey.) on the Tongass was completed. This was an important decision affecting roadless areas, but is separate from the Roadless Rule, and only affected the Tongass National Forest. While the FY03 Appropriations Act stipulated that the SEIS decision was not subject to administrative appeal, the Roadless Rule may be held up in court proceedings until sometime after FY05 (nationally).

Effect on Timber Program

With the exemption of the Forest from the prohibitions of the Roadless Rule efforts are underway to restore a normal timber sale program as prescribed under the 1997 Forest Plan. The short-term challenge remains to offer enough economically viable timber volume to sustain existing mills at a time while serious concerns on the viability of the industry remain. A combination of litigation and mutual cancellation of non-economic sales may reduce domestic process economic volume under contract to about 47 million board feet (mmbf). We estimate that approximately 150 mmbf per year is necessary to maintain current industry. To address this deficit we are accelerating ongoing efforts to prepare sales in roaded areas as we resume or begin new planning efforts in roadless portions of the Forest. The tightest supply will occur in 2004 when we expect to offer only about 80 mmbf. In the long run the available timber under the 1997 ROD is about 267 mmbf per year. Limiting harvest to the roaded base would have reduced that to about 50 mmbf.

More Information

Dan Castillo, Alaska Region Director of Forest Management, 907-586-7875.

Current as of March 2004

USDA Forest Service - Tongass National Forest
Last Modified: November 25, 2007