The U.S. government loses more than $50 million a year building roads and subsidizing a dying logging industry in the nation`s largest national forest, Alaska`s Tongass National Forest, the Wilderness Society charged Monday.
”This is a no-win timber program; both the taxpayer and the environment are losers,” said former Sen. Gaylord Nelson, the society`s counselor and chief spokesman. ”We are systematically destroying a rare rain forest while we urge other countries to save theirs.”
The society, in a report issued after two years of study, said it costs taxpayers $36,000 a year for each job generated by logging in the Tongass, which has been subsidized for 30 years in an effort to help settle southeast Alaska. Neither of the two major timber companies which operate there, Louisiana Pacific Corp. and Japanese-owned Alaska Pulp Corp., make a profit.
The society called the Tongass the worst example of the ”below cost”
timber sales issue, which has caused increasing concern among environmentalists and sportsmen. The Forest Service sells much of the timber from the national forests at less than it costs to build roads to get the timber and to administer the sale.
The society`s report sparked charges from Alaska`s Sen. Ted Stevens (R.)
that environmentalists were reneging on a 1979 agreement which led to the successful passage of the Alaska Lands Conservation act.
”They`re declaring war on Alaska again,” Stevens said. ”They want to renege now on a suggestion they themselves made in 1979.”
The society and other environmental groups which wanted many millions of acres of land declared wilderness, and thus out of bounds for logging, suggested a dedicated fund for the Tongass forest of $40 million a year to enhance timber production, and agreed to a level of lumbering of 4.5 billion board feet each decade.
”The Tongass timber fund was the suggestion of the environmental groups and particularly the Wilderness Society,” Stevens said.
He acknowledged that the timber industry has had poor years recently in the Tongass, as it has elsewhere. But he said he feared the Wilderness Society was attempting to ”build resistance” to increased cutting in the future, now that the Japanese yen has become stronger against the dollar and more timber will be going to Japan.
Stevens said if the society succeeds in having the $40 million fund rescinded for the Tongass, he will attempt to have Congress take the land reserved as wilderness back out of the system.
Nelson said the Alaska land law also provides for a five-year review, and allows for changing terms at the end of that time. He said that was the legal provision under which the society was recommending severely decreased lumbering in the Tongass.
A spokesman for the Forest Service also criticized the Wilderness Society report. The spokesman said the society`s figures charge such long-term costs as research, timber stand improvements and building of permanent facilities against a single year of timber sales.
