Trump to strip protections from Tongass Nat. Forest, one of the biggest intact temperate rainforests

[Celerity]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2020/10/28/trump-tongass-national-forest-alaska/



President Trump will open up all 16.7 million acres of Alaska’s Tongass National Forest to logging and other forms of development, according to a notice posted Wednesday, stripping protections that had safeguarded one of the world’s largest intact temperate rainforests for nearly two decades.

As of Thursday, it will be legal for logging companies to build roads and cut and remove timber throughout more than 9.3 million acres of forest — featuring old-growth stands of red and yellow cedar, Sitka spruce and Western hemlock. The relatively-pristine expanse is also home to plentiful salmon runs and imposing fjords. The decision, which will be published in the Federal Register, reverses protections President Bill Clinton put in place in 2001 and is one of the most sweeping public lands rollbacks Trump has enacted.



For years, federal and academic scientists have identified Tongass as an ecological oasis that serves as a massive carbon sink while providing key habitat for wild Pacific salmon and trout, Sitka black-tailed deer and myriad other species. It boasts the highest density of brown bears in North America, and its trees — some of which are between 300 and 1,000 years old — absorb at least 8 percent of all the carbon stored in the entire Lower 48?s forests combined. “While tropical rainforests are the lungs of the planet, the Tongass is the lungs of North America,” Dominick DellaSala, chief scientist with the Earth Island Institute’s Wild Heritage project, said in an interview. “It’s America’s last climate sanctuary.”

While Trump has repeatedly touted his commitment to planting trees through the One Trillion Tree initiative, invoking it as recently as last week, his administration has sought to expand logging in Alaska and in the Pacific Northwest throughout his presidency. Federal judges have blocked several of these plans as illegal: Last week, the administration abandoned its appeal of a ruling that struck down a 1.8 million-acre timber sale on the Tongass’s Prince of Wales Island.

snip

[Kid Berwyn]

1. Thanks, Putin.

FUCK YOU, TRUMP! ASSHOLE! TRAITOR!!!!!!!!!

[Eliot Rosewater]

2. He and the GOP are killing us, on purpose. There is NO difference between a trump

supporter and an armed nazi soldier.

[Celerity]

5. Yes, it is a massive carbon sink, so destroying it will help facilitate further hastening of

global climate change.

death cult

[Solly Mack]

3. K&R

Barbaric.

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

4. One more thing for Biden to undo.

[sinkingfeeling]

6. He can try. First the lawsuits will come and then Biden.

[ananda]

8. Good!

The mistreatment of the Amazon is bad enough.

[Thunderbeast]

7. So...Now we know the price for Lisa Murkowski's SCOTUS vote.

[blm]

9. Eve of Destruction

[BComplex]

10. I think DUers need to start making a list of atrocities that Biden & Harris need to clean up

ASAP after they get in office. It might be a benefit to them to have our help on this, because there are so f***ing many things that have been screwed up so badly!

[Botany]

11. Trump is just doing this to be a dick so he can own "the libs"

How much is the wild run salmon who use the Tongass' streams and rivers to spawn are worth.

How many tons of CO2 does that area sequester every year? And how many millions of dollars
does that area bring in from "outdoor tourists" does this area bring in every year?