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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
May 23, 1997
AFA CALLS REVISED TONGASS PLAN
The Alaska Forest Association today criticized the Forest Service for its final version of the Tongass Land Management Plan revision. "The volume of timber to be made available annually under this plan will clearly be inadequate to sustain an integrated timber industry in Southeast Alaska." said executive director, Jack Phelps. "The plan fails to satisfy the needs of the timber industry, its workers, their families and the timber dependent communities as described by the Governor’s Timber Task Force and by the Alaska Legislature. Both those bodies concluded that a minimum annual harvest of 300 million board feet is necessary to sustain an industry in Southeast Alaska. This plan will not support that level, and the AFA is not going to sit idly by and watch while the Clinton Administration crushes our remaining industry." "The forest industry agrees completely that we should take measures to protect critters and to harvest the national forest for sustained yield. But the vast majority of the Tongass is already in protected status. There is no reasonable basis for further damaging the livelihoods of the remaining timber workers to satisfy those who promote comic book science, Phelps said. In writing this new plan, the government made a huge effort trying to prove the unprovable, and paid scant attention to the needs of the people who live and work here. Trying to get an 80 percent certainty that animals will be able to interact with each other one hundred years into the future clearly took precedence over determining how the new restrictions would affect people. This is worse than inappropriate and wrong; it is utter foolishness." "In addition to issues of substance, the AFA argued that the plan was improperly formulated, according to Phelps. The law requires the Forest Supervisors to put this plan together. Instead, the White House Council on Environmental Quality has been micro- managing the plan revision. The results were predetermined, and the goal clearly parallels that of the radical national environmental movement, which is to end all harvest on America’s national forests regardless of consequences to people." Phelps said. " In short, the plan fails the people of Southeast Alaska, and fails to meet the planning requirements of the National Forest Management Act ( NFMA ) and the clear direction of the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA) and the Tongass Timber Reform Act ( TTRA ) to maintain a viable timber industry in the region." Phelps.
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