Cascadia Sues Tongass National Forest

CORDOVA— Cascadia Wildlands Project joined with Greenpeace to file a lawsuit in District Court in Anchorage today, challenging 1,700 acres of old-growth logging in four timber sales on the Tongass National Forest, in Southeast Alaska.

At root this case is about maintaining abundant, huntable deer populations on the Tongass. Major restrictions on deer hunting are a certain result of ancient forest logging in this part of the world. That is because big trees provide food and shelter for deer during hard winters. Without these sheltering stands, deer are vulnerable to catastrophic populations collapses during deep snow winters. Climate Change further compounds the problem. 

Deer are a critical subsistence food for residents, and the main prey of the rare Islands Wolf. 

The Forest Service broke the law by fudging the science in its "Deer Model," to serve their political goal of getting the cut out. The two most glaring errors were using habitat quality data that it knew was not correlated to facts on the ground, and applying the wrong multiplier. The combined result was to underestimate logging impacts to deer habitat by as much as 120%. When confronted with the mistakes, rather than fix them the Forest Service concealed the information from the public.

Credit for the dogged pursuit of these errors goes to Larry Edwards, a former Alaska pulp mill worker-turned Greenpeace forest activist. For years and to anyone who would listen he patiently explained the errors, only to be stymied by the political arm of the Forest Service. Todays lawsuit was the last resort. 

Nobody wins with this now-familiar pattern of twisting science to justify a political position. Mills won't get their wood, residents won't get their deer, wolves won't get their dinner, and environmentalists and Forest Service employees will spend their time in court, rather than out in the woods cooperating on restoration projects. 

The boom days of old-growth logging are over, and no amount of scientific trickery or political bullying will bring them back. The sooner the Tongass catches up with their colleagues in the Pacific Northwest, who have made restoration forestry priority #1, the better off we'll be.

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