What’s really at stake by rescinding the Roadless Rule
- Guest contributor
- 7 hours ago
- 3 min read
By Rich Moniak
As I wrote in the Juneau Empire four years ago, it “would be an epic battle” if the Roadless Rule protected 9.4 million acres of the Tongass National from development. “But it’s really an argument over 1.8% of what the statement erroneously implies.”
In her recently published commentary, Ariel E. Hasse-Zamudio bases her entire defense of the Roadless Rule on a common misperception. While it’s true that 9.3 million acres of the Tongass fall with the boundaries of inventoried roadless areas, the vast majority of it doesn’t need a regulation to prohibit development.
This interactive map of the Tongass illustrates the some of the reasons. The area designated Category B1 is “Inventoried Roadless area where road construction and reconstruction is prohibited.” The largest contiguous B1 area on the map runs from the Taku River all the way to Skagway. It’s almost all icefields, glaciers, and barren mountaintops.
Note that only the northern tip of Admiralty Island is shown as an inventoried roadless area. Road building in vast majority of the rest of the island is prohibited by its wilderness designation. It and 16 other Tongass wilderness areas encompass 5.7 million acres.
In addition, the 2016 Forest Management Plan includes 879,000 acres “designated in perpetuity as LUD II” which are to be managed “in a roadless state to retain their wildland character.” Just over 3 million acres for “Remote Recreation” where motorized access is limited to boats, aircraft, and snowmachines. And 92,000 acres of wild and scenic rivers.
None of that will be affected by repealing the Roadless Rule.
Based on the Environmental Impact Statement prepared five years ago, I estimated “fully exempting the Tongass from Roadless Rule would only add 168,000 acres of old-growth timber to the 227,000 acres that’s already available for future harvest.”
That might have been a little low. The Southeast Alaska Conservation Council thinks it’s 190,000 acres.
But while the Audubon Society pegged it at 185,000 acres in 2019, their headline still screamed that lifting “Roadless Protections Will Likely Cause Extinctions in Alaska’s Tongass.”
In any case, it’s not anywhere close to the “more than 9 million acres” of “currently protected lands” that Trout Unlimited claimed would become vulnerable to “expanded clear-cut logging of old-growth forest and construction of logging roads.”
Last month, the Alaska Conservation Foundation, which Hasse-Zamudio referenced in her article, got it wrong too. They compound that mistake by claiming 5.4 million of the 6.9 million acres of the Chugach National Forest will also be at risk.
But what’s worse is how the misleading figures they used became part of a plea for donations. It’s no different than the National Rifle Association telling its members that Democrats want to take away all their guns.
Or what Donald Trump did following the 2020 election.
The fact check site Snopes found that “for weeks after Election Day, the Trump campaign continued to distribute urgent calls for money alongside several misleading or false claims attempting to sow doubt and confusion over Biden's victory.”
Of the 11 fundraising appeals they examined, six were found to be completely false, two mostly false, and two had a mixture of true and false statements. One they rated true, but it only involved “several absentee ballots” that were found in a ditch in Wisconsin along with three trays of mail.
Trump’s lies about widespread voter fraud did more to undermine trust in our elections than any person or organization in American history. And although miniscule by comparison, the fight over the Roadless Rule is a distraction from the damage he’s currently inflicting on our Constitution and democratic institutions.
If we must have this debate, then it should be based on verifiable facts, not emotional appeals constructed from misinformation.
“First, get your facts straight,” U.S Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote in a Washington Post opinion four decades ago. “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts. Second, decide to live with the facts. Third, resolve to surmount them. Because, fourth, what is at stake is our capacity to govern.”
If we fail to heed that advice, we stand to lose a lot more than 2% of the Tongass National Forest.
• Rich Moniak is a retired civil engineer who worked for the U.S. Forest Service in Alaska for 14 years.
