No, the “decades old Roadless Rule” does not protect “more than half of the Tongass National Forest from road development,” as stated in the first sentence of a news story that was broadcast on KTOO and Alaska Public Media last week. That’s because, as I argued in a recent Anchorage Daily News opinion, “regulations aren’t needed to prevent roadbuilding on landforms such as the sprawling Juneau and Stikine icefields.”
Or for the more than 2 million acres of icefields and tidewater glaciers inventoried as roadless on the 6.9 million acre Chugach National Forest in Southcentral Alaska.
Unlike the past decade, the debate over the Roadless Rule is no longer just about the Alaska exemption. Last week, the Trump administration announced the start of a 21-day comment period about its intent to rescind it for “nearly 45 million acres of the nearly 60 million acres of inventoried roadless acres within the National Forest System.”
Below, I explain why almost a quarter of it won’t be rescinded. For now, let’s look at how both sides misuse the same information to exaggerate the impact of this unnecessarily controversial rule.
U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins proclaimed the “burdensome, outdated, one-size-fits-all” Roadless Rule hampers fighting forest fires and stifles economic growth in rural America.
The problem with that statement is she’s applying a one-size-fits-all to the benefits of rescinding it. Destructive forest fires don’t pose a threat to all of the amazingly diverse national forest landscapes. Down south that includes millions of acres of rugged mountains, treeless slopes, lakes and barren desert lands that contain very little to no developable natural resources.
Environmental organizations twist the narrative in the opposite direction. For instance, under a photograph of a forested slope on the Tongass, the Wilderness Society claims rescinding the Roadless Rule “would be the single largest rollback of conservation protections in our nation’s history.”
And Trout Unlimited has argued that exempting the Tongass would leave more than 9 million acres “vulnerable to industrial clear-cut logging of old-growth forest.”
The reality is within those 9 million acres, only about 200,000 are old growth forests suitable for timber harvest.
Solid, unbiased journalism should cut through all that misinformation.
That’s not what KTOO produced last week.
For starters, the article got the history of the Roadless Rule wrong by equating the national rule with the on-again-off-again Alaska exemption which wasn’t even mentioned. More troubling was the reference to the environmentally friendly exaggeration of how much land is protected by the Roadless Rule. The story was further slanted to that perspective by quoting only local residents who support the rule.
That should have been a red flag for the news director at KTOO.
Why Alaska Public Media rebroadcast the story, or a similar one produced earlier in the year by KRBD in Ketchikan, is a mystery to me. Because after I criticized a story which they co-produced with Coast Alaska in 2021, in later stories written by the Coast Alaska reporter, he replaced the 9 million acre protection line with a more realistic impact of the Roadless Rule.
KTOO reporters who cover this issue should be reviewing archived stories like those. The Empire’s recently published “Threads of the Tongass” series would also have been an excellent reference. It captured the viewpoints of timber industry representatives. In particular, Tessa Axelson, the executive director of the Alaska Forest Association, pointed out the obvious problem of claiming the Roadless Rule protects 9 million acres of the Tongass from development.
In 2008, the Republican governor of Idaho understood that the Roadless Rule doesn’t need to be controversial. He signed legislation that permitted road construction in roadless areas for limited forest management purposes, including mitigating the threat of serious wildfires. The Obama administration defended challenges to that in court.
Under a Democratic governor, Colorado enacted similar legislation in 2012.
That’s why those states are being excluded from the Trump administration’s proposed recission.
It’s relatively simple for journalists to help diffuse the Roadless Rule controversy in Alaska. Put more effort into explaining why it has little to no impact on the vast majority of National Forest lands that’s designated to remain roadless. And stop repeating the political talking points used by the two sides fighting over it.
• Rich Moniak is a Juneau resident and retired civil engineer with more than 25 years of experience working in the public sector. Columns, My Turns and Letters to the Editor represent the view of the author, not the view of the Juneau Empire. Have something to say? Here’s how to submit a My Turn or letter.
