Jim Furnish, a former top U.S. Forest Service official, has a strong message for his former bosses – stop the ecologically-damaging and money-losing practice of old-growth logging in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest and do it now.
In an editorial published in the Juneau Empire this week, Furnish laid out a compelling case for why Forest Service officials should “make a clean break” with Tongass old-growth logging and do this “as quickly as possible.”
Furnish supervised Oregon’s Siuslaw National Forest during the spotted owl crisis of the 1990s. He decided to stop clear-cutting of Siuslaw old-growth timber and instead shift the focus to second-growth harvest. That decision essentially ended environmental lawsuits or appeals to stop logging and the Siuslaw has been producing a reliable, sustainable timber harvest of 40 million board feet annually ever since.
The same thing should happen on the Tongass, he argues. Among other things, Furnish cites a recent study using the Forest Service’s own data that concludes that a full transition from old-growth to second-growth logging can happen on the Tongass immediately. He’s right.
Read the full text of the column here.
In an editorial published in the Juneau Empire this week, Furnish laid out a compelling case for why Forest Service officials should “make a clean break” with Tongass old-growth logging and do this “as quickly as possible.”
Furnish supervised Oregon’s Siuslaw National Forest during the spotted owl crisis of the 1990s. He decided to stop clear-cutting of Siuslaw old-growth timber and instead shift the focus to second-growth harvest. That decision essentially ended environmental lawsuits or appeals to stop logging and the Siuslaw has been producing a reliable, sustainable timber harvest of 40 million board feet annually ever since.
The same thing should happen on the Tongass, he argues. Among other things, Furnish cites a recent study using the Forest Service’s own data that concludes that a full transition from old-growth to second-growth logging can happen on the Tongass immediately. He’s right.
Read the full text of the column here.
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