The Last of the Best: By the Numbers
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For years, the timber program on the Tongass has operated under an economic logic that defies common sense. According to reports by the Southeast Alaska Conservation Council, between 1982 and 2004 the U.S. Forest Service spent an average of $40 million per year on its Tongass timber program, despite miniscule returns on timber sales. Today, the Tongass timber industry fares even more poorly in the competitive globalized timber marketplace, the reports concluded, because of the high cost of logging and transporting the cut logs. On its Tongass National Forest website, the Forest Service explains that “profitability is not a yardstick used for evaluating the performance of the national forest timber sale program.” In Alaska, it says, timber sales “provide benefits beyond the revenues earned,” such as roads and docks for recreation access or as a transportation system for island communities. The agency also says commercial timber harvesting provides 2,000 jobs a year when the market for timber is high. In October 2007, logging accounted for 300 jobs, and wood product manufacturing provided 300 jobs in all of Alaska, according to the state’s Department of Labor and Workforce Development. Total non-farm employment, minus the fishing industry, came to 316,500. The Forest Service estimates road construction costs on the Tongass at $160,000 per mile, sometimes going as high as $500,000. The reason for the continued road building, despite high costs and a backlog of $100 million in road maintenance, “is a function of needing to access the rest of the suitable timber land base that still has no access,” according to the website. “We are not subsidizing the timber industry, but rather, the harvest of timber is subsidizing the development of our road infrastructure for future resource management.” However, the Forest Service was called on the carpet in 2005 for using inaccurate market projections to justify timber harvest numbers. The 1997 Tongass Forest Plan allowed an annual logging harvest of 267 million board feet, based on what the agency calculated as market demand. Environmental groups filed suit, saying the agency’s numbers were inflated. In 2005, the Ninth Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals agreed, ruling that the Forest Service had inaccurately doubled the market demand for Tongass timber. The agency’s own economists had put demand between 68 million board feet and 154 million board feet, depending on market strength. In the wake of the ruling, the Forest Service cancelled nine proposed timber sales in roadless areas. The questionable use of taxpayer money on the Tongass has not gone unnoticed in Congress. The U.S. House of Representatives has three times passed the Chabot-Andrews amendment, which blocks federal spending on roads intended to be used by private logging operations in the Tongass National Forest, most recently in June 2007. The bill still awaits action by the full Senate. In the revised plan for the Tongass, released in late January, the Forest Service adhered to an annual maximum harvest of 267 million board feet of timber per year, the same figure discredited in the 2005 court ruling. |