Rule or no Rule, logging continues in Southeast Alaska
Past practices make protections even more important
Logging is destructive, but necessary. Historically it has been unnecessarily destructive, especially here in Southeast Alaska, one of the last stands of strong salmon and steelhead runs. More than a few times in the last twenty years I have been asked why, if there is a Roadless Rule in effect in Southeast Alaska, so many hillsides have been freshly cut and others that are healing but bear the scars.
Tongass National Forest makes up the overwhelming amount of Southeast Alaska which makes the region mostly Federally owned. But that’s not the entire story of Southeast Alaska.
Timber was one of the main economic drivers in Southeast Alaska for nearly a century. Productive old growth features trees of up to 300 years old, reach nearly 200 feet high and be worth upwards of $100,000 each. However, large-scale logging started in the late 1800s in Southeast Alaska has taken its toll.
According to the Southeast Alaska Conservation Council, “From the 1950s to present day, more than 1 million acres of the Tongass have been clearcut, and roughly half of the forest’s large old-growth trees were logged in the last century.”
Though half of the 16.7 million acre Tongass National Forest (established by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1907) is composed of glaciers, rock, alpine and muskeg, the remaining land is thickly forested. In 1947 the Ketchikan Paper and Pulp Company won a 50-year contract to log in the Tongass and in 1954 the Ketchikan Pulp Mill, the largest mill in the region, opened.
Small communities like my hometown of Klawock benefited from the timber industry. But conversations about sustainability, pace and best practices cast doubt on long term feasibility of industrial scale logging. Forest Service research revealed the devastating impact that logging too close to streams had on riparian habitat for salmon and steelhead. While slightly aged clear cuts provided superb summer and fall deer habitat, second growth that wasn’t properly thinned created nearly impenetrable swaths of land deer couldn’t use.
Environmental standards also had a tremendous effect on the future of industrial logging and the pulp mill in Ketchikan would have needed expensive modernization to satisfy EPA standards. The Forest Service often loses money on timber sales since it is on the hook for building the road to access the timber and since most of the easy to access prime timber had been cut, road construction would have been even more expensive. All of these factors contributed to the closure of the Ketchikan mill in 1997 when the 50-year contact expired and dramatic slowing of logging in Southeast Alaska.
The Roadless Rule was then enacted in 2001 to protect the remaining old growth stands. The Trump administration repealed the Roadless Rule in 2020, it was reinstated in 2023 and now is on the verge of being struck down again. But that doesn’t mean roads are not being built. Exemptions to the Roadless Rule have allowed access to sites for hydroelectric projects, mining and other construction while the Forest Service worked on an Old Growth Amendment which was a nationwide effort to conserve old growth stands and phase out timber sales in those areas.
Not just the Tongass
Modern technology has made logging incredibly efficient yet 800 million acres or a third of America is still covered with forests yet the United States is the No. 1 importer of lumber in the world. Twenty-five percent of our 60 billion board feet of lumber used annually comes from overseas.
Though 90 percent of Southeast Alaska is Federally owned, significant amounts of logging has been done on state land and private. The Seaalaska Corporation is the largest private landowner in Southeast Alaska with 365,000 acres and was heavily invested in the timber industry throughout the 1980s as were village corporations.
According to a timber harvest study done by the US Forest Service, “Native corporation timber harvests began in 1979 and grew rapidly to about 400 million board feet in 1987 and 1988…More than 3 billion board feet were harvested by 1989. Most of the timber is exported as round logs, primarily to Japan. Most of the village corporations will have harvested all their merchantable timber by 1991.”
Much of the harvest was old-growth that was transferred from Tongass National Forest to Seaalaska as part of Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (1971).
“Most of the timber harvested by Sealaska, some 80 to 85 percent by the company’s own admission, came from old-growth trees of at least 100 years of age, triggering criticism from environmentalists and some of Sealaska’s 23,000 shareholders. Only about 5 to 10 million board feet came from previously harvested, or second growth, lands.”
Most of the Native corporations, Seaalaska included, have since transitioned out of the industry and are some of the biggest players in the tourism industry. Cape Fox (Ketchikan) has commercial subsidiaries in Ketchikan that include tourism and restaurant ventures as well as its Federal Contracting Group that works nationwide.
Acreage has also been transferred from Federal to State ownership in land swaps that were then opened to logging. The Alaska Mental Health Trust manages land for the maximum value which in some cases means to keep habitat pristine, in others, it’s to transition to a cash value. That land can be swapped with Federal land and once in state hands, the land can also be sold. In some cases this eases property cost and allows more building opportunities for communities without much available land. This transfer of land from Federal to private hands should not be confused with the public land sale proposed by Sen. Mike Lee.
The timber market
Logging as a general term conjures thoughts of a mutilated landscape. A bad memory of irresponsibility and gluttonous extraction of resources. Yet the current industry, influenced by efficiency and sustainability, has changed dramatically.
Weyerhaeuser is one of the largest timber producers in North America with over 10.5 acres in the United States and 14.1 million in Canada and certainly isn’t attempting to log itself out of business. It only cuts 2% of its total timber annually and must be on the cutting edge of regrowth, thinning and management for long term viability.
Weyerhaeuser primarily deals with building products cut from uniform timber at mills designed to meet market demands.
What large scale industrial companies like Weyerhaeuser can’t, or won’t produce, is specialty and music-grade wood. Southeast Alaska old growth is filled with high-grade Sitka spruce and cedar which is the most valuable and desired timber available. Viking Lumber on Prince of Wales Island has an exclusive deal to supply valued old growth for Steinway & Sons for pianos that cost up to $100,000. Only 1-2% of the Sitka spruce is deemed high enough quality for use in manufacturing, so specialty demand is far from enough to keep the mill in business. The most lucrative option is shipping old growth overseas.
Today most of the logging infrastructure is gone and retooling (rebuilding roads, equipping mills) would take time and money. Returning to the production levels during the heyday would require convincing families to move back to small communities on islands in rural Alaska, risking their future in a volatile industry.
Transition
As Alaska shifts more to tourism an increasingly loud argument is that people don’t pay to come visit clearcuts. An intact ecosystem is the revenue generator and also impacts fish and wildlife, two other significant draws to the region. Still, tourism accounts for less than 10% of the state's revenue though it is the main driver of the state's economy. Between July 3-4, 2025, 11 cruise ships docked in Ketchikan, depositing over 30,000 tourists into a town of roughly 12,000. It is tremendous for the local economy, but there are questions about its sustainability too.
Everything about the hardworking, solitude of rural living is disrupted by the frenetic energy brought by the cruise ships that burn between 140-250 tons, or up to 80,000 gallons, of fuel per day.
While logging might be good for some local economies, it is a small portion of Alaska’s economic engine which is mostly dependent on oil, oil investments and the Federal Government.
The Permanent Fund was created to make Alaskan residents essentially shareholders in the state’s resource economy and receive an annual dividend. It is often cited as an example of Universal Basic Income, but the Permanent Fund Dividend (PFD) checks Alaskans receive is from investment revenue, not redistributed taxes. (Alaska does not have a state income tax.) The annualized return over the last 40 years has been 8.7% to over $80 billion which includes $10 billion in an Earnings Reserve Account (ERA). Only the ERA is a spendable account, which will ensure that Alaska will have a balance substantial enough to generate meaningful earnings to fund the state budget.
But the spendable portion of the Perm Fund is nearly gone, eaten up by rising costs, and the state legislature has taken up to half of the PFD checks to help with the state budget. This has been deemed unconstitutional if not robbery by many Alaskan residents who cite the intent of the PFD and a low tax burden making life possible as prices, especially in rural Alaska, continue to rise.
Many Alaskans have no problem forgoing a portion of their PFD each year to ensure funding for infrastructure projects or education. But as is usually the case, it comes down to a lack of trust in politicians. Many fear combining the separate funds into one, or accessing the principal, would be the beginning of the end which is why Alaska sits in a precarious financial position.
Given the financial situation which has led to, among other things, school consolidation and closures, it’s not surprising that some Alaskans are convinced that the best way out is to drill, cut or mine.
Though that might be wishful thinking, it still provides support for a push to return things to the way they were. But the logging heyday was decades in the making and there is no switch to turn the timber market into what it was in the 1980s.
That’s good news for salmon, deer and for the majority of Americans who don’t want their taxes going to the destruction of the pristine, resilient, yet fragile habitat.