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Tongass National Forest Loses Vital Protections
Joel Jackson, president of the Organized Village of Kake tribal council, has long championed protections for the Tongass National Forest.
Colin Arisman
This issue brief is part of a series outlining public lands in Alaska that are in danger of losing protection.
Overview
Since 2016, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the U.S. Forest Service have advanced five efforts that would dramatically alter protections for some 60 million acres of federally managed land in Alaska. If fully enacted, the policies and decisions outlined in those proposed and finalized plans would open vast stretches of the Bering Sea-Western Interior, Tongass National Forest, Central Yukon, National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, and unencumbered BLM land to extractive development and have significant impacts on Alaska’s lands, rivers, wildlife, and the Indigenous peoples who call these landscapes home.