Clearcutting the Last 1000 Year-Old Rainforest in America for Pennies - Creating a Green Desert

The US Forest Service is about to clearcut one of the last stands of big-tree old growth on Prince of Wales Island in Alaska, and its own draft admits it could substantially damage the deer hunt that feeds the island. Tongass Forest Supervisor Monique Nelson signs the decision.The Tongass is the largest intact temperate rainforest on Earth, holding about thirty percent of that forest type left on the planet. More than half of North America’s coastal rainforest is already gone. This is public land. You own it. And the old growth up there stores the equivalent of about one and a half times this country’s annual carbon pollution, a service it does for free right up until it’s on a truck.Prince of Wales is Tlingit and Haida homeland. Five thousand people, no road off it, subsistence is how you eat. Deer survive winter in old growth specifically, because the canopy catches snow while letting light down for forage underneath. Fish and Game says so. Deep snow, no old growth, deer starve. Carvers need big old cedar for totem poles and canoes, and June subsistence hearing testimony hammered the government’s analysis for barely mentioning them. You cannot carve a canoe out of a fifty-year-old tree.The defense is that it grows back. Sure. In a thousand years. The timber rotation, meaning how soon they cut it again, is ninety to a hundred and twenty years. It never becomes old growth. It becomes inventory. The clearcuts from the sixties are the proof. A Forest Service wildlife technician, standing in one growing back since 1960: “There’s no forage for deer at all.” Sixty-six years, and it feeds nothing.Since 1954, 94 percent of the big contiguous old growth on northern Prince of Wales has been cut. Ninety-four percent. The plan is to go back for the six. That’s eating the whole birthday cake, then coming back for crumbs and calling it portion control.The payday? The Forest Service’s own estimate for the whole sale, sixteen hundred and fifty five acres, is 6.65 million dollars in labor income and between 113 and 121 jobs. Trump’s ballroom costs north of eight hundred million. They’re liquidating the last big old growth on that island for under one percent of a party room.Nelson’s line is that “providing a supply of timber to the American people is a central part of the Forest Service’s mission.” My dude. Private land supplies 89 percent of the wood this country cuts. National and state forests together are about eleven. Nobody’s house is going unbuilt because a thousand-year-old spruce is still standing in Alaska.If the Park Service put sixteen acres of Sequoia National Park up for the saw there’d be congressional hearings by Thursday. Nobody’s holding a hearing about this one, because they called it Unit 346, a name you give a parking space.Will and Jim Pattiz at More Than Just Parks hiked in with a camera, found an occupied bear den inside the cut boundary, and filed it into the official record before the chainsaws. Two unpaid guys did the looking.Nelson can pull those sixteen acres out of the sale. Her office is 907-225-3101. Ask her why she’s cutting the biggest trees left in the last great rainforest of its kind on Earth.Sources:More Than Just Parks broke this story and did the literal legwork. Follow them and subscribe. https://www.fs.usda.gov/r10/tongass/newsroom/releases/forest-service-seeks-input-twin-mountain-ii-timber-sale-projecthttps://www.krbd.org/2026/06/03/forest-service-holds-subsistence-hearing-for-proposed-prince-of-wales-logging-project/https://www.adfg.alaska.gov/index.cfm?adfg=deerhunting.mainhttps://www.ktoo.org/2022/11/03/scientists-present-theories-for-deer-decline-at-prince-of-wales-island-deer-summit/https://www.eenews.net/articles/old-or-young-growth-tongass-logging-at-a-crossroads/https://alaska-native-news.com/tongass-rainforest-in-alaska-is-a-carbon-sink-of-global-importance/61535/https://www.fao.org/4/x4995e/x4995e.htm Get full access to The Rogue Voice aka Linsay Rousseau at linsayrousseau.substack.com/subscribe