JUNEAU -- The U.S. Forest Service's biggest Tongass National Forest timber sale in years, the Big Thorne sale on Prince of Wales Island, has been approved by a federal judge who Friday rejected challenges from environmental groups.
Among the claims of the groups challenging the timber sale were that the Forest Service overestimated the demand for timber from Southeast Alaska and that the Big Thorne sale would harm the Alexander Archipelago wolf and other species that rely on the forest.
But U.S. District Judge Ralph Beistline upheld the sale, rejecting the claims of the Southeast Alaska Conservation Council and nine other groups, brought in two lawsuits he merged for his decision.
The Forest Service was supported in its efforts to defend the sale by the Alaska Department of Law, due to the reliance of Southeast Alaska's remaining timber industry on logs from the sale.
The Big Thorne sale includes 6,186 acres of controversial old growth and a smaller amount of less controversial young growth and 46.1 miles of logging road. That number of acres, while the largest in many years, will provide for an annual harvest over several years that's small compared to the harvest levels in the Tongass' timber heyday. Back then, logging fed pulp mills in Ketchikan and Sitka and associated sawmills.
Today the pulp mills are gone, and the biggest thing the industry has going is Viking Lumber Co. a medium-sized sawmill in Klawock.
It was Viking Lumber that won rights to harvest the Big Thorne sale in bidding last fall.
The Southeast Alaska Conservation Council was a plaintiff in the lawsuit, filed by environmental law firm Earthjustice. SEACC attorney Buck Lindekugel said Friday he was disappointed with Beistline's ruling.
The judge's ruling said that while various federal laws governing the Forest Service's timber sale process, including the National Environmental Policy Act, require a process that ensures various impacts are considered, they don't necessarily require a particular outcome.
Several of the challenges looked at logging's impact on the area's wolf population, such as the loss of denning sites and increased hunting due to the new roads and possible lack of deer, but in every instance the judge supported the Forest Service and called its actions reasonable.
"The Court finds that USFS did sufficiently, and in a reasonable manner, disclose and address the impacts to wolf population and therefore did not violate the NEPA," Beistline wrote in his decision.
He also determined that the Forest Service assessment of demand for the timber was reasonable, despite plaintiff claims that the U.S. recession had decreased demand for lumber.
"I was disappointed that the judge gave the agency as much deference as he did," Lindekugel said.
"It's a stacked deck going against a federal agency, it's a high burden to meet, but I thought we met it," he said.
SEACC and other plaintiffs only received the ruling late Friday and haven't fully analyzed it, but would consider the possibility of an appeal to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, he said.
"Our commitment is to making sure the Forest Service protects all users of the forest, including the deer hunters and subsistence hunters," he said.
The Forest Service should focus on ensuring that Tongass is used to keep the fishing and tourism industries vibrant, not the tiny timber industry, he said.
But the state has made keeping Viking Lumber alive a key goal, and said that the timber provided by the Big Thorne sale would help do so and the mill's 50 jobs are regionally important.