Alaska’s Tongass National Forest at Risk Once Again

In the early 1990s, NRDC advocates began making the case to set large portions of U.S. Forest Service lands off-limits to logging and other destructive industries. By that time, more than half of the agency’s lands had been sliced up by roads and compromised by development, leaving little room for actual wilderness. Roads, NRDC experts knew, quite literally clear the way for extractive activities like logging and drilling, and themselves cause erosion, pollution, and disruption to wildlife. Stop the roadbuilding, and you could stem the damage. 

Helping to grow support for national Roadless Rule protections, NRDC focused its efforts around the unparalleled Tongass National Forest. 

The threat of road expansion here is an obvious vulnerability for the wild lands that stretch across nearly 17 million acres and lie at the heart of the world’s largest intact temperate rainforest. The Tongass stores more carbon per acre than almost any other forest on the planet. Its centuries-old trees, alpine meadows, and streams provide habitat for more than 400 species, including Alexander Archipelago wolves (found primarily in southeastern Alaska), brown and black bears, bald eagles, and all five species of Pacific salmon. 

“A Roadless Rule that excluded the Tongass was not a nearly big enough win for the environment,” says former director of NRDC’s Alaska program and attorney Niel Lawrence, who led the Tongass advocacy. 

Nor would its exclusion be good for its people. For millennia, the forest’s rich natural resources have also supported the Indigenous Haida, Tlingit, and Tsimshian people, who rely on these ancestral homelands for food, water, medicine, and traditional ways of life. 

So momentum grew for a federal roadbuilding ban that could protect the Tongass as well as millions of acres of other U.S. forests from unchecked development. 

In 1999, the Forest Service instituted a temporary roadbuilding moratorium for more than 100 national forests. Soon after that, Lawrence wrote a memo to the agency outlining why it should make the moratorium permanent, extend this nationwide, and include a ban on commercial logging. After holding more than 600 public hearings and receiving more than a million public comments, the Clinton administration signed off on the Roadless Area Conservation Rule in January 2001. It was a landmark moment for American forests. 

“NRDC is built to do things like the Roadless Rule—those big, sweeping changes that fundamentally reshape the legal landscape to advance environmental protections,” Rose says. “And part of that is being there after the ink is dry to keep defending them from the attacks that inevitably come.” 

Unfortunately, those attacks came quickly. 

Just days after its passage, timber and energy interests, backed by their allies in certain state governments, tried to stop the law from going into effect. When the Bush administration took office, it attempted to delay the rule’s implementation and later proposed a do-nothing alternative that would allow states to opt out. It also approved an exemption of the Tongass from the Roadless Rule altogether—the first of multiple attempts to hand the Tongass over to industry. 

But throughout, NRDC and its allies stood guard, repeatedly going to court against those who attacked the Roadless Rule. Thanks to the solid science and years of analysis underpinning the Roadless Rule, it held firm, and the attempts to exempt the Tongass were thrown out by the courts. 

That is, until another environmentally unfriendly administration took up the crusade. 

The first Trump administration brought with it a tsunami of environmental rollbacks. Despite the fact that the logging industry had largely left southeastern Alaska by this point, it was the president himself who instructed the Forest Service to exempt the Tongass in 2020, and once again, in 2025. 

Standing in strong disagreement, however, are those in southeastern Alaska—who rely on the region’s billion-dollar tourism, recreation, and commercial fishing industries. More than 95 percent of public comments, which included nearly 40,000 signatures from NRDC members, opposed the Tongass exemption in 2020. When the administration ignored this feedback and finalized the rule anyway, NRDC, alongside Earthjustice and representing a number of allied Indigenous and other groups, took the agency to court. 

Soon after, the Biden administration came into office, bringing a commitment to climate action and a dedication to center Indigenous communities—like southeastern Alaska’s Haida, Tlingit, and Tsimshian peoples—who stood to be most impacted by ill-considered projects. 

“The administration reached out to Tribes in southeast Alaska, listened to what they said, and prioritized their interest in this land that they’ve lived on for many thousands of years in a way that no administration, Democratic or otherwise, had done,” Lawrence says. “I think it stands as a watershed moment for how the federal government approaches decision-making with existential consequences for Indigenous groups.” 

Once again, NRDC staff and members built momentum, submitting public comments and getting in front of policymakers to demand a full reinstatement of the Roadless Rule. The advocacy paid off when, in January 2023, the Forest Service restored full protections for 9 million acres of the Tongass, which had thankfully remained undisturbed by development in the meantime. 

“The restoration…is a great first step in honoring the voices of the many Tribal governments and Tribal citizens who spoke out in favor of Roadless Rule protections for the Tongass,” Naawéiyaa Tagaban, environmental justice strategy lead for Native Movement, said in a statement issued at the time.

Environmental advocates and local businesses alike are determined not to let these lands meet the same fate as so much of the nation’s old-growth forests. Southeastern Alaska welcomes millions of tourists each year, who come primarily to experience the region’s stunning natural expanses. According to an annual report on the region’s economy, issued by the business-focused Southeast Conference, tourism is the top employer, encompassing 8,300 jobs and nearly $350 million in earnings for the sector in 2024. 

As cruise season got underway last year, many in the industry worried about how this logging-focused policy agenda and the rash of federal workforce cuts would affect the Alaska visitor experience—and the state’s economic future. Juneau-based tourism representatives told the Anchorage Daily News that virtually all the employees at the Mendenhall Glacier Visitor Center, part of the Tongass National Forest, had lost their jobs. Some 700,000 visitors descend on the site annually. 

With the Tongass being a centerpiece of Alaska’s eco-travel economy, a climate powerhouse, and a vital resource for the communities who have stewarded the forest for millennia, its ability to withstand the whims of political adversaries has depended on the resolve of a diverse community of advocates. “Would we have gotten this far without the action of a coalition? Absolutely not,” Rose says. 

“These places are only protected because there’s a dedicated group of folks who are willing to stand there and keep fighting,” he adds. “Year after year after year.”