"Logging Plan For Alaska's Tongass National Forest Challenged In Court"

"ANCHORAGE, Alaska - Environmentalists in Alaska filed a lawsuit on Tuesday seeking to block a Trump administration plan to open vast swaths of the nation’s largest national forest to logging, nearly a third of it in old-growth timber.

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Anchorage, seeks to stop the U.S. Forest Service from going ahead with what opponents say would mark the largest sale of timber from the Tongass National Forest in 30 years under a plan the agency approved in March.

The court challenge argues that the sale would open old-growth woodlands on Prince of Wales Island in the Tongass to wide-scale logging without proper study of the environmental impact on what remains of North America’s largest temperate rain forest. "

Yereth Rosen reports for Reuters May  7, 2019.

Source: Reuters, 05/08/2019