Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics: Federal Judge Protects Tongass Old Growth

March 18 - A federal judge in Alaska dismissed a timber-industry lawsuit seeking to allow old-growth logging on the Tongass National Forest, the world’s largest temperate old-growth rainforest. Viking Lumber, Alcan Timber, and the Alaska Forest Association sued the Department of Agriculture in an effort to overturn an Obama-era forest management plan for the Tongass. The lawsuit alleged that the federal Tongass Timber Reform Act of 1990 required the Forest Service to offer enough timber sales to meet market demand. Judge Sharon Gleason disagreed, dismissing the lawsuit. “Whether the harvest levels are designed to actually meet market demand is a discretionary agency action, not a mandatory requirement imposed by the TTRA on the Forest Service,” she wrote. Read ON.