FS-2025-0001-533631

I am a resident of Southeast Alaska, and I am concerned about your proposed repeal of the Roadless Rule areas, especially in the Tongass National Forest. I am a commercial fisherman and a personal use harvester. I am writing to implore you to keep the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Act in place. PLEASE CHOOSE “NO ACTION” – RETAIN THE EXISTING ROADLESS RULE. Roads fragment wildlife habitat into small, isolated parcels that then contribute to declining deer populations, as is currently the case on the heavily-roaded Prince of Wales Island. Sediment runoff, especially from roads and logging on steep slopes, chokes salmon spawning beds. Wild places are the backbone of the southeast Alaska economy. According to the Forest Service, many of Alaska’s >2 million annual visitors come to the Tongass to hunt, fish and recreate, while spending over $350 million annually. The visitor industry contributes nearly $4 billion to the Southeast Alaska economy and provides some 7,752 jobs. The Tongass also produces some 40 percent of Alaska’s commercial salmon fishery worth an estimated $414 million in 2015. While all jobs are important to Alaskans, jobs in mining (<1000) and logging (<500) pale by comparison. It has been demonstrated in Southeast Alaska that logging and mining cannot provide sustainable economic gains for people and communities over the long-term. Therefore, when we develop logging or mining today, we must be careful to ensure that this development is not to the detriment of our salmon fisheries or to our access to personal or subsistence use hunting and fishing rights. Repealing the Roadless Rule would expose the Tongass National Forest to unsustainable logging, mining, and infrastructure development, and would pose an extreme threat to our salmon fisheries. All inventoried roadless areas in the Tongass National Forest should continue to be protected in the future. I live in Southeast Alaska and depend on these areas for commercial and personal use fishing/hunting. The Tongass is a temperate rainforest that is not subject to the wildfires and the wildland-urban interface issues of national forests down South, and therefore it should not be managed for these issues. Roadbuilding and timber harvest will not reduce insects and disease; it will exacerbate these issues by reducing climate resilience. Removing the 2001 Roadless Rule would be fiscally irresponsible. The USDA itself has recognized that there is a $6.9 billion backlog in road maintenance. Taxpayers have subsidized the Tongass timber program at a rate of over $25 million per year, with individual timber sales like Big Thorne losing roughly ten dollars for every dollar of revenue generated. Why should we pay to subsidize a failing timber industry, at the expense of our tourism and outdoor recreation industries? Flexibility and exceptions are important - and the 2001 Roadless Rule already includes them. Roads for hydroelectric projects, mining, telecommunications, and other community needs are allowed — 13 of Southeast's 16 hydroelectric projects are located in Roadless areas. A note on logging: Logging is not a high-profit or sustainable industry in Southeast Alaska. Timber road construction on the Tongass costs over $250,000 per mile, which is why the Tongass old-growth logging program is completely dependent on millions of dollars in annual subsidizes paid by taxpayers that unknowingly bankroll controversial old-growth logging projects. A 2003 Department of Labor report explains that the long-term competitiveness of the Alaskan logging industry has been declining (due to the remote location and high costs of harvesting), overtaken by the increasing share of tree farming on the global market. Other evidence suggests that logging in the Tongass is so costly that if subsidies were removed, each tree would actually cost taxpayers money. There is no place for large-scale logging in Southeast Alaska’s economy. Our old-growth trees are most valuable when they stay in the ground. Rather than considering a repeal of the Roadless Rule, your agency should be creating a law that makes it illegal to export raw forest products to foreign countries. We have lost too much of our forests’ value to foreign countries. If the USDA is actually interested in prioritizing the needs and interests of local forest users, I urge them to listen to what Southeast Alaskans have been saying all along: abandon the proposed repeal and keep the 2001 Roadless Rule in place on the Tongass National Forest. I support retaining the existing rule (the ‘‘No Action Alternative’’).