Sigh. Another 39 million board feet to be shaved off a remote Tongass NF island

Here's a nice satellite image of Zarembo Island near Wrangell, Alaska, courtesy of maps.google.com. The island is about ten miles across from end to end. Tongass Forest Supervisor Forrest Cole said his freshly signed (yesterday) Baht Timber Sale achieves "balance" and will construct six miles of new roads, six miles of "temporary" (mmmmhmmm) roads, and will re-open an unspecified number of miles of formerly closed roads "for subsistence use." By my count that is at least 12.5 miles of roads (and probably many more) for a timber sale that is about two square miles in size. In other words: six miles of roads per square mile of denuded forest. Distributed evenly, that would mean no point in the area will be more than about 850 feet from a road.

Here's the Forest Service press release.

Their website also features illuminating responses to recent indictments of their forest management by the National Geographic and others. In these responses they champion their "model of sustainability" that they apparently use to to achieve balanced road densities and healthy fish and wildlife habitat.

--Zadig