Biden restores protections to Alaska’s Tongass National Forest

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has reinstated logging and road-construction bans across more than half of Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, reversing a Trump-era rollback and delivering a major win for Indigenous communities and conservationists who had fought for years to restore the protections.

At a glance

• Tongass National Forest: Spanning nearly 17 million acres — slightly larger than West Virginia — it is the largest national forest in the U.S. and stores 44% of all carbon dioxide held in national forests nationwide, according to the Alaska Conservation Foundation.
• Roadless rule: First established under President Bill Clinton in 2001 C.E., the regulation blocks logging and timber road construction in designated areas of national forests; it was stripped for the Tongass by the Trump administration in 2020 C.E. before Biden’s USDA restored it.
• Indigenous land rights: Tribal Nations in Southeast Alaska, including the Organized Village of Kake, were among the leading voices petitioning the USDA to restore protections for a forest their communities have depended on for thousands of years.

Why the Tongass matters

The Tongass is one of the world’s largest intact temperate rainforests. Its old-growth stands of cedar, hemlock, and Sitka spruce — some over 800 years old — shelter more than 400 species of land and marine wildlife. The streams running cold beneath its canopy support wild salmon runs that feed both ecosystems and communities.

For Joel Jackson, president of the Organized Village of Kake, the forest is not an abstraction. He has lived within its boundaries his entire life. His community hunts deer and fishes salmon from its streams. “The forest is key to our survival as a people, to our way of life … for thousands of years,” Jackson said after the decision was announced.

Environmental scientists have increasingly pointed to forests like the Tongass as critical infrastructure in the global effort to slow climate change. Its massive carbon stores make it one of the most valuable carbon sinks on the continent. Protecting old-growth forest at this scale, researchers say, is among the most cost-effective climate interventions available — no new technology required.

A decades-long fight

The roadless rule’s history in Alaska has been anything but settled. Clinton’s administration introduced it in 2001 C.E. to protect roadless areas in national forests from industrial logging. Alaska was granted a partial exemption at the time, but subsequent administrations tightened and loosened restrictions in cycles tied closely to political shifts in Washington.

In 2020 C.E., the Trump administration removed the Tongass from the roadless rule entirely, following sustained lobbying from Alaska’s Republican state officials, who argued the rule limited economic development and blocked road access to remote communities. Conservation groups and tribal nations immediately began pressing for reinstatement.

The Biden administration’s USDA framed the decision as one that “reflects the voices of Tribal Nations and the people of Southeast Alaska, while taking into account the importance of fishing and tourism to the region’s economy,” according to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack.

Notably, several local business owners pushed back against the framing that the roadless rule harmed the regional economy. Gordon Chew, co-owner of the small family-run Tenakee Logging Company, said that logging employment in the Tongass had already declined sharply over three decades — driven by high fuel costs for transporting timber from a remote, isolated region, not by the rule itself. “If you believe in global warming, see the value of sequestering carbon, and you like the fishing industry and support tourism, these are all things that the roadless rule enhances,” Chew said.

What Indigenous communities are saying

For tribal communities throughout Southeast Alaska, the restoration of the roadless rule was a long-awaited recognition — but not yet a moment of full relief.

Jackson welcomed the decision and celebrated with his community. But he was careful to note that administrative protections can be undone by future administrations, as the last decade has made painfully clear. He said he will not feel fully secure until the protections are made permanent — a step that could require an act of U.S. Congress.

“I describe walking into the forest as walking into one of the most beautiful cathedrals you’ll ever find in the world,” Jackson said. “I don’t want to have my grandchildren, their grandchildren, to have to fight for that too.”

Meredith Trainor, executive director of the Southeast Alaska Conservation Council, echoed that sentiment, calling the rule “really important to have in place to have another impediment to a resurgence of logging in these intact forest areas.” She noted that while the rule has long been “contentious with Alaska politicians,” it has not been nearly as contentious with the broader public in the region.

A win with asterisks

Republican Alaska officials — including Senators Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan, and Governor Mike Dunleavy — immediately condemned the decision. Murkowski called it turning “the Tongass into a political football.” Sullivan pledged to fight it. These are not empty objections: future administrations retain the authority to reverse the rule again, as happened in 2020 C.E.

The U.S. Forest Service’s Tongass page details the scope of the forest’s ecological value, while The Nature Conservancy’s Alaska program has documented the carbon sequestration role old-growth forests play in the broader climate picture. Scientists and conservation groups, including the Alaska Conservation Foundation, have called for permanent congressional protections as the only durable safeguard.

That permanence is still the unfinished work. Until Congress acts, the Tongass remains one election cycle away from another reversal — and the communities who depend on it know it.

Read more

For more on this story, see: BBC News

For more from Good News for Humankind, see:

• Indigenous land rights recognized across 160 million hectares ahead of COP30
• Ghana establishes marine protected area at Cape Three Points
• The Good News for Humankind archive on indigenous rights

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