Photo Credit: Howie Garber
Thursday, March 12, 2020 - On Wednesday, March 11, the Sierra Club and our allies Southeast Alaska Conservation Council, Defenders of Wildlife, Center for Biological Diversity, Audubon Alaska, Alaska Wilderness League, Natural Resources Defense Council and Alaska Rainforest Defenders secured a major victory in our lawsuit challenging an enormous commercial timber harvest and road-building plan for Prince of Wales Island in the Tongass National Forest of Southeast Alaska. A federal judge ruled that project approval violated the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which sets standards for public engagement on federal projects that will alter the environment, and the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA), which requires federal agencies to evaluate how federal use of public lands will affect subsistence uses and needs. The court found that the Forest Service “presented local communities with vague, hypothetical, and over-inclusive representations of the Project’s effects over a 15-year period.” It’s not yet clear whether the Forest Service will have to abandon the project entirely, because the judge has not yet decided on a legal remedy. Read the court ruling.
The U.S. Forest Service had green-lighted a sweeping 15-year logging scheme over a 1.8-million-acre project area across Prince of Wales and surrounding islands, part of a program dubbed the Prince of Wales Landscape Level Analysis. While the plan also included restoration and recreation projects that plaintiffs were supportive of, the lawsuit specifically challenged logging and road-building. It would have been the largest timber sale on any national forest in 30 years, allowing for 164 miles of new road construction and the logging of enough trees to equal a forest three times the size of Manhattan, or 67 square miles. More than half the planned logging acres would have targeted old-growth trees, which are uniquely effective at absorbing the greenhouse gas emissions that drive climate change, and in many cases have been standing for centuries.
The eight conservation organizations are represented by the nonprofit environmental law firm Earthjustice.