Alaska: Tell Obama to save the Tongass Rainforest
The inauguration of President Obama could mean the end of an
eight-year assault on America’s last pristine forests. We need your
help to make sure the Obama administration makes a new commitment to
protecting these remaining wildlands for generations to come. Please
go to http://www.savebiogems.org/tongass/takeaction and urge President
Obama to take immediate action to preserve the old growth wilderness
of Alaska’s Tongass National Forest.
In its final days, the Bush
administration set in motion a plan to start clearcutting the ancient,
majestic trees of the Tongass, our nation’s largest intact rainforest.
Unless the Obama administration reverses this disastrous policy,
chainsaws will start cutting through the Tongass as early as this
spring, with logging in many of our nation’s other pristine forests
likely to follow. When the Roadless Area Conservation Rule was first
adopted, millions of Americans cheered its historic passing, which
protected 58.5 million acres of wild national forest lands from
development.
Over the past eight years, however, the Bush
administration repeatedly attempted to dismantle the Roadless Rule. It
refused to defend the rule in court, worked to rescind the rule one
state at a time, and even went so far as to “exempt” the Tongass
rainforest from roadless protections. The Bush administration’s final
plan for the Tongass would increase logging fivefold, and create
logging roads through priceless habitat for grizzly bears, thriving
salmon runs, bald eagles, and the elusive Alexander Archipelago wolf.
http://www.unobserver.com/layout5.php?id=5597&blz=2
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As a Forest Service retiree, I know that the national forests in Alaska are violating the export substitution law when they sell trees that do not have any ecological reason for being logged.
Concerns to plausible recipients: FIRST, as stipulated in the preceding epistle: LET’S
SAVE the Tongass National Forest! We must preserve and protect ALL infrangible and
irrevocable habitat and habitation. We must” Assail the Assault” and “Slay the Assassin.” As it is with “Cut the Crap” and “Park the pork” in the monumental multi-
Billion Stimulus abomination. Let’s not further empower the Corporate and enviscerate
entrepreneurship. Let’s NOT endanger democracy to socialism. Similarily, let’s NOT
permit despoliation be the villain of our “American Way of Life.”
Only the inestimable, helpless environment and biological species incapable of maintaining survivorship against “the survival of the fittest” or “the cruel corporate world” need assistance and then only when necessitation engenders other or
further exigencies.
LONG LIVE OUR DEMOCRACY, OUR COUNTRY, OUR FREEDOM, OUR WAY OF LIFE, OUR
STRENGTH, OUR PURSUIT OF LIFE, LIBERTY, AND HAPPINESS! LET NOT ANY ABOMINABLE CULPRIT OR DERANGED GROUP OFCONGRESSIONAL CONSTITUENTS
DESTROY OUR TREASSURED EXISTENCE!!
Sincerely, George L., Hopefully a Staunch Defender of the US of A!
Awaiting Moderation? From Whom? the liberals? Where is the First Amendment?
Gone with the abolition of “Talk Radio?” or “Talk TV?” Don’t LET them PULL THE PLUG
ON THE FIRST AMENDMENT!
What’s Next? Moving the Census Bureau to the White House? For What? Oh!
I think we know!!!!
“Cut the Crap” amd “Park the Pork” on the BLOATED stimulus simulation!!!!!!
from a Loyal, Conservative Lover of our Democracy and Freedom, George L Hosea
http://www.seacc.org/files/SEACC%20Final%20Testimony%20for%2010-08-09%20Hrg%20on%20S881.pdf
Big hearing today in DC Senate Committee Natural Resources Forestry subcmte re S 881 which would give away 80,000 some acres to Sealaska Corporation out of the Tongass National Forest. It would also open the door of ANCSA 1970 so that inholdings in National Parks, Monuments, and Wilderness Areas or Wildlife Refuges could be opened to commercial use by Alaska’s Indians.
Before the United States Senate
Committee on Natural Resources
Subcommittee on Forestry
October 8, 2009
Written Statement on S 881
of
Alan Stein
Former
Director of the Salmon Bay Protective Association
And
President of the Point Baker Association
Thank you Mr. Chairman and Members of the Committee for placing this statement into
the record for this hearing on S 881.
Many important legal events surround the area that is the subject of this bill and with
your indulgence, I am going to provide you with that context, the better to inform your
deliberations, so you can see what protections this bill could remove and what injustices
would occur.
For it is this area on northern Prince of Wales Island that has spawned two major forest
lawsuit battles and the National Forest Management Act of 1976.
In 1793,the British explorer George Vancouver, on board the Royal Navy’s Discovery, named the
islands you see before you after the first son of King George who was the Prince of Wales. The early
explorers called it the Prince of Wales Archipelago and it was for a time the intention of Spain to
develop a large harbor on its west coast more expansive than San Francisco Bay.
The island is huge. It takes more than an hour to fly from its southern border at 54 degrees 40 minutes
North latitude to Point Baker on its north end at 56 degrees and 20 minutes. It’s about a 120-mile trip
across our nation’s third largest island.
Northern Prince of Wales Island, where Sealaska wants to log, shot from the Space Shuttle Discovery is on the right side, middle
of the photo. The Mainland of Alaska runs from the middle bottom to the middle left. The view looks slight N of W.