Washington has quietly made logging a part of the state’s climate mitigation strategy.
The Forest Behind Bruce Anderson’s home in the rolling foothills south of Puget Sound in Washington is densely packed with enormous Douglas fir trees, the most commercially harvested tree species in the United States. It is a natural forest, grown from seeds dispersed by a previous generation of conifers around the time of the Civil War.
AS THE SKY CLEARED over rain-swept Southeast Alaska one August afternoon in 2019, we flew over Prince of Wales Island to take in its lush forests. Numerous fresh clearcuts interrupted the deep green cover on the United States’ fourth largest island located at the southern end of Alaska’s massive Tongass National Forest. In some spots, stands of younger trees stretched their canopies across older, logged areas. On the whole, though, the forest here looked rich and vast.
After 35 years of clearcutting Southeast Alaska forests, Sealaska says it wants to generate “sustainable value” for shareholders.
Starting in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, the Trump administration is proposing to eliminate long-standing rules protecting 50 million acres of ancient forests across the country from logging and roadbuilding, raising new alarms about the president’s disregard for the climate and wildlife.
Taxpayers, already spending billions to keep Alaska’s timber industry afloat, could end up paying even more. If Trump strips roadless protection from the Tongass, no National Forest is safe.
Driving up the Pacific Coast Highway from San Francisco, you approach the world’s largest contiguous temperate rainforest. But don’t look for any markers or directions. There aren’t any. In fact, the rainforest, which stretches 2,500 miles from Northern California all the way to Kodiak Island in the Gulf of Alaska – almost as far as the distance as from New York to Los Angeles – doesn’t even have an official name.
Washington has quietly made logging a part of the state’s climate mitigation strategy.
The Forest Behind Bruce Anderson’s home in the rolling foothills south of Puget Sound in Washington is densely packed with enormous Douglas fir trees, the most commercially harvested tree species in the United States. It is a natural forest, grown from seeds dispersed by a previous generation of conifers around the time of the Civil War.
DURING THE LAST HALF of the twentieth century, loggers cut down a hefty slice of old-growth forest blanketing Prince of Wales island, the fourth largest island in the United States located at the southern end of Alaska’s massive Tongass National Forest. And now the Trump administration is coming back for the rest.
The Pacific Coastal Temperate Rainforest, stretching from Northern California into Alaska, is known best for things that grow above the ground — like the world’s tallest trees, and in its waters, like the legendary salmon runs. But we know far less about treasures lurking underground, like the vein of rare earth elements tucked away deep within Alaska’s Tongass National Forest – America’s largest national forest.
Journey to the Heart of the Great Bear Rainforest by Paul Koberstein Situated just at the far edge of western markets, money and politics, the Great Bear Rainforest lives on as it has for 10,000 years. Nowhere else in the Earth’s temperate zones can you find such a large, biologically rich, intact rainforest. Yet civilization …
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BC’ s Shortchanged Species A decade ago, Canada led the global fight to preserve biological diversity . Canada was the first nation to sign the International Convention on Biodiversity at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in June 1992 and was the first industrialized nation to ratify it. So, what has Canada done since …