The Nation - News from March 24, 1988

The House Interior Committee voted to curb big timber harvests in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest. By a voice vote, the panel approved legislation pushed by conservation groups to scrap a 1980 law guaranteeing that the U.S. Forest Service gets at least $40 million a year to spend on Tongass timber sales. The money, much of it for logging roads to ancient stands of huge trees, was mandated as part of the compromise that saw public lands in Alaska apportioned for various uses. The 1980 law set a goal of commercially harvesting 450 billion board feet of Tongass trees every 10 years from non-wilderness sections of the forest.