During a hearing of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee to examine the President’s $5.3 billion budget request for the U.S. Forest Service for Fiscal Year 2021, Senator Lisa Murkowski advocated on behalf of the need for sustainable timber harvesting and recreation access in Alaska, particularly in the Tongass.
The Chief of the Forest Service, Vicki Christiansen, was the hearing’s sole witness. After addressing concerns that have impacted the timber and recreation industries in Alaska, such as lawsuits and retaliatory tariffs from China, Ms. Christiansen expressed her ultimate desire to fulfill Alaska’s needs: “We’re looking at the situation there and we’re trying to adjust accordingly, and we’re committed to continue to work on this, to be flexible and meet the needs of Alaska.”
Senator Murkowski, in response: “You need to know that I view this as wholly unsatisfactory. Instead of moving forward, instead of actually seeing some results translate on the ground, we’re going backwards – which I didn’t think possible. Through policies, through litigation, you have managed to eliminate an industry and an opportunity for people who live in the nation’s largest national forest.”
While the Forest Service has set a national harvest goal of four billion board feet for 2020, the agency made just 5.6 million board feet available in the Tongass – the largest national forest – in 2019. That is just 0.14 percent of the 2020 goal.
Murkowski also said that Alaskans plan to visit Ms. Christiansen to discuss the future of the Tongass: “You will be visited by a group of Alaskans this week who will not only share with you their concern about, again, this downward trend that has gone so low that we could not have even imagined that it would be this bad, but they’ve also been hit with the double-whammy with regards to the Chinese tariffs. That came out of left-field.”
Before the end of the hearing, Ms. Christiansen committed to re-evaluate stumpage rates on spruce logs harvested on the Tongass to help offset the damaging impacts of China’s ongoing retaliatory tariffs.