The Lost Coast near Cape Yakutaga, AK (Brett Cole)
January 10, 2010: Three environmental groups sued the Forest Service in Federal District Court in Anchorage today, challenging the Logjam timber sale project on Alaska’s Tongass National Forest. The plaintiffs — Tongass Conservation Society, Greenpeace, and Cascadia Wildlands — are asking the court to cancel the 3,422 acre timber project on Prince of Wales Island. The project would log 73 million board feet of timber and build 22 miles of new roads. The lawsuit claims the Forest Service grossly failed to consider the project's impacts on deer, wolves, and salmon. Take a virtual tour of the threatened area.
December 22, 2009: A diverse coalition of Alaska Native, tourism industry, and environmental organizations took action today to protect some of the last pristine old-growth areas in the Tongass National Forest. These areas are important to Southeast Alaskans for hunting, fishing, customary and traditional subsistence uses, tourism, and recreation. They are also important to the world for their storage of carbon, which combats global warming. The lawsuit filed today — Organized Village of Kake v U.S. Department of Agriculture — seeks to end the 2003, Bush-era decision to "temporarily" exempt the Tongass from the national Roadless Rule. The lawsuit asserts that this exemption was illegally adopted. "We must not lose more roadless areas here," said Mike Jackson with the Organized Village of Kake. "For Tribal members, these lands are essential sources of food, medicine, clothing, and traditional items for artistic and spiritual use," he continued. "Our deer hunting and other customary uses of the forest have suffered too much already from past logging," he added.