My name is Hillary Hunter. I am vehemently against the repeal of The Roadless Rule. I was born and raised in Petersburg Alaska and now live in Juneau. I have spent the majority of my life living in the Tongass National Forest. I have also hiked the Pacific Crest Trail California to Washington, going through many national forests and wilderness areas. I went to college in Bozeman next to the Gallatin National Forest. I lived up on the Kenai Peninsula for a summer in the Chugach National Forest. This is to say that my experience being an American and my vision of our country is strongly shaped by our national forest system and I have come to this opinion through hands on lived experience.
Research conducted by the U.S. Forest Service has shown that nearly two thirds of fires that are human caused begin along roads. Building more roads into deeper wilderness area does the opposite of helping to prevent and fight wildfires. It creates greater swaths of high risk areas. It is also a bad faith argument to say that The Tongass needs roads to access areas of unhealthy forest that need to be logged in order to prevent wildfires. The Tongass is a rainforest and is not at risk of wildfires. It makes me, a local, wonder if the people proposing these decisions for my home are either uneducated on the areas that they manage or attempted to manipulate and lie to people.
Creating roads to log The Tongass does not make sense either. It is so logistically difficult to remove logs from the forest, ship them to processing plants and distributors from this archipelago that the cost ends up being higher than the profit. Also healthy forest is essential to our economy. We need our salmon runs to not be disturbed. Damaging waterways where salmon return to spawn is bad for commercial fishing, subsistence fishing, and sport fishing which is an important part of the tourism economy.
We have over 1.5 million cruise ship tourists a year with a season that only covers our short summer. This is a lot of people for such a short amount of time. They come here to see the wildlife and vast expanses of wilderness. They do not come here to see roads crisscrossing mountains and bald clear cuts.
Retaining wilderness areas with no road access is required for Alaska to retain our majestic landscapes and ecosystems that both locals and visitors love. I have worked at a popular Forest Service sightseeing location on a roadsystem and one that is only accessible by boat, plane, or kayak. They both serve different purposes such as accessibility to the public and education. That is wonderful. It also means that I have seen first-hand how it impacts the health of the ecosystem. The place with no roads has next to no litter and the animals aren't harassed by thousands of people a day. It gives migrating birds to salmon to bears a place to live as they normally would in a world not shaped by humans. Places such as this have inherent value and allow us to avoid the pitfalls of sliding baseline effect. If the original is completely erased how do we know what we have lost.
Places that have been heavily logged, such as Prince of Wales, have issues with deer population. The vegetation grows back too dense for deer to be able to have their fawns in the areas they would normally pick. They can't move through clear cuts with downed trees or the thick brush as it grows back. This can result in them having their fawns in locations that leave them exposed to predators and cars. Subsistence is important to people who live near national forests and in Alaska especially.
There are many reasons that the Roadless Rule should not be repealed that are environmentally, culturally, and economically sound. Leave our wild places for the next generation and the ones after.