On June 23, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced the Trump Administration’s decision to abolish the rule that bans roads in 58.5 million roadless acres of the 193 million acres managed by the U.S. Forest Service, including 9.37 million acres of Tongass National Forest in southeast Alaska.

The Tongass is Earth’s largest essentially intact temperate rainforest and the ancestral homeland of the Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian peoples. It includes glaciers, mountains, fjords, and most of the Alexander Archipelago’s 1,100 islands. It’s drained by 15,700 miles of streams and rivers that sustain some of the continent’s healthiest populations of Pacific salmon (all five species), steelhead, rainbow, Dolly Varden, and coastal cutthroat trout. The Tongass is an important sanctuary for wildlife, much of it imperiled elsewhere. In winter, it’s warmer than my home state of Massachusetts, which it exceeds in size by 11.7 million acres.

Throughout the Tongass’s roadless section, old-growth Sitka spruce, western hemlock, red cedar and yellow cedar stabilize soil, shade and cool salmonid habitat, sequester carbon, and pump out oxygen. Some of these trees were alive in the Middle Ages.

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