To Road or Not to Road: The latest backspin for the Tongass National Forest.

• Author: Simonelli, Isaac Stone
• Position: TRANSPORTATION

Half of Southeast Alaska has no road access to its natural resources. During the 20th century, this fact was a consequence of slow development in a thinly populated territory. As the 21st century dawned, however, whether to allow or forbid roads in the wildest parts of the Panhandle became a political tennis match.

The outgoing Clinton administration served the first volley in 2001 with the Roadless Rule, which banned road building in areas of national forests without road access. This policy has the greatest impact in the nation's largest forest, the Tongass in Southeast Alaska, where 9.4 million of its 17 million acres lack roads.

"Tongass National Forest has motivated people for a very, very long time. It's the crown jewel of the National Forest system. It's worth fighting for," says Kyle Moselle, executive director of the Alaska Department of Natural Resources Office of Project Management & Permitting. "I think that you're always going to have a spectrum of opinions about how the Tongass should be managed."

Alaskan officials protested immediately that the rule conflicted with the management plan already in place for the Tongass. By 2003, the Tongass was exempt, but in 2011 the ban was reinstated. Then a smash in 2020, when US Forest Service adopted the Alaska Roadless Rule, exempting the Tongass from the ban on road building, with limited exceptions.

However, the Alaska Roadless Rule has never been implemented in any meaningful way, arriving amid a change in presidential administrations. A Forest Service spokesperson says a new final rule is expected by the end of the year.

Heavily involved in developing the Alaska Roadless Rule, Moselle says he's disappointed in the Biden administration's proposal to repeal it.

"They are simply reverting back to the national rule that I think is a poor fit for the Tongass," he says.

His view is in step with the Alaska Congressional delegation.

"Southeast Alaska deserves a sustainable economy, but the one-size-fits-all Roadless Rule works against that. It should never have been applied to Alaska, and it should not be re-applied this year or any other," the delegation wrote in a joint statement in January.

The Salmon Forest

The back-and-forth stems from a fairly simple conflict: the timber industry needs logging roads to access resources on public lands, whereas intact trees have value for other interests.

"It's all one ecosystem," says Alaska Longline Fishermen's Association Executive Director Linda...