Defending America’s Climate Forest | Earthjustice

The old-growth trees of the Tongass National Forest provide a major buffer against climate change. John Hyde / Wild Things Photography

Jul. 29, 2019

Wanda Culp lives in one of the most important woodlands in the world. Here, old-growth trees of the Tongass National Forest still stand tall along the coastline and islands of Southeast Alaska.

The Tongass, located in Alaska’s panhandle, is the largest national forest in the United States.

The Tongass stores hundreds of millions, if not over a billion, tons of carbon, keeping the heat-trapping element out of the atmosphere.

Conservation scientist Dominick DellaSala of the Geos Institute knows all too well the importance of the Tongass for fighting climate change. “If you hug a big tree, you’re actually hugging a big stick of carbon that has been taking up and storing up carbon for centuries,” he says.
When DellaSala began his career as a young research ecologist, he landed a contract with the U.S. Forest Service to study the impacts of old-growth logging in the Tongass. This was the late 1980s, when the timber industry routinely clear-cut ancient, towering trees from the nearly 17-million-acre temperate rain forest. Things reached a point of absurdity when even some of DellaSala’s study plots were about to be fed into the jaws of industry.
DellaSala remembers asking the Forest Service, “Hey, wait a minute, could you go somewhere else with these chainsaws? Because we’re right in the middle of this study that you funded.”

Scientists have long understood that logging old-growth forests triggers a cascade of negative effects on wildlife, eroding the biodiversity of places like the Tongass. More recently, DellaSala and research collaborators have shown that old-growth logging worsens climate change.
Old-growth trees, growing in a coastal zone at northern latitudes, are mighty stalwarts in carbon sequestration. The Tongass is what DellaSala terms “a national champion,” capturing 8% of all the carbon stored in U.S. forests.

Courtesy of Dominick DellaSala
DellaSala’s work has shown that old-growth logging worsens climate change.

Clear-cutting old-growth, on the other hand, transforms ancient forests into carbon emitters.
DellaSala authored a report analyzing a Forest Service plan to log more than 43,000 acres of Tongass old-growth and nearly 262,000 acres of young-growth. His calculations showed that this would have the same emissions impact as adding four million vehicles to Alaska’s roads — and keeping them there for a century.
And the new trees that grow back are not much help in the short term. A study by other scientists shows it can take more than 200 years for regrown forests to capture as much carbon as logging releases.

In the last years of the Obama administration, then-Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack planned to phase out old-growth logging in the Tongass. Trump’s Forest Service jettisoned that aspiration, and it has approved plans for the largest old-growth logging project in the country in decades, on the Tongass’ Prince of Wales Island.

Our Clients in The Lawsuit Southeast Alaska Conservation Council, Alaska Rainforest Defenders, Defenders of Wildlife, Sierra Club, Alaska Wilderness League, NRDC, National Audubon Society, Center for Biological Diversity

Earthjustice’s Alaska-based attorneys filed a lawsuit on May 7, 2019, challenging the massive timber sale. The lawsuit says the Forest Service is violating the National Environmental Policy Act and failing to comply with the agency’s own management plan for the Tongass.

The Trump Forest Service is also considering an even greater threat to the Tongass. The 2001 Roadless Rule — which Earthjustice attorneys have successfully defended several times in court — is one of our country’s greatest land conservation measures.
In Alaska, the Roadless Rule prevents road-building in wild areas that would otherwise be targeted for even more publicly subsidized old-growth logging. Yet Trump’s Forest Service is in the process of deciding whether to exempt Alaska from this critical policy. If proponents of this rollback get their way, old-growth forests will fall in a new round of clear-cuts.

Destructive clear-cut logging disrupted every mode of indigenous life, Culp says — but she holds out hope for the future nevertheless. “I trust that my children and grandchildren will carry forth the importance of all living things in this place we call home,” she says. 

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