For decades, the Roadless Rule banned new roadbuilding and logging across millions of acres of national forest land. The Trump Administration has moved to lift the ban, and that's controversial in Alaska's Tongass National Forest, the largest national forest in the U.S.
Around half of the Tongass in Southeast Alaska has no active roads, an area spanning more than 9 million acres.
On a recent afternoon, Judith Dax̱ootsú Ramos walked through a roadless area on Douglas Island. She's a Lingít anthropologist from Yakutat, a small Alaska Native village, and said the forest supports Lingit traditions, including harvesting berries and hunting deer.
"Without this, we're going to lose our traditional medicines, our traditional art styles, our traditional foods, and all that is really connected to the forest," Ramos said.
Ramos sits on the board of the Southeast Alaska Conservation Council, a local nonprofit advocating to keep the Roadless Rule in place. The board visited Prince of Wales Island, a heavily logged part of the forest. Ramos said the trees that grew back in old-growth clear cuts looked sterile.
"It's a very different forest, and there was no animals, no birds there, and it was kind of really quiet, and so it was kind of scary," she said.
The Lingít have lived in the region that is now the Tongass for at least 10,000 years. Ramos said it's important to protect the forest so people can live here long into the future.
"We can't ignore that our climate is changing," Ramos said. "We need an intact forest system."
The Tongass National Forest is a carbon sink. It holds a third of all carbon stored in intact U.S. national forests, according to research published in the scientific journal AGU Advances.
The Roadless Rule has been rolled back and reinstated multiple times since the U.S. Department of Agriculture established it to protect forestlands in 2001. Retaining the rule has drawn broad public support each time it's been on the chopping block.
This time, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has said that it wants to roll back the Roadless Rule nationwide to give firefighters access to fight wildfires and remove regulatory barriers. In this part of Alaska, where wildfires are rare, many think that's an excuse to bolster the timber industry, which has declined significantly since the 1990s.
But could the move stimulate a logging boom in the Tongass?
"There certainly is a piece that would make some supply available," said Tessa Axelson, executive director at the Alaska Forest Association, a timber advocacy group based in Ketchikan. "It is not significant volume that is going to fix the challenges the industry has."
Loggable land
According to the U.S.Forest Service, 188,000 acres of currently roadless land could be considered suitable for logging in the Tongass under the current Forest Management Plan if the road ban dissolves. That would be less than 2% of the Tongass. Roughly 4% of the forest has already been logged.
Although about half of the Tongass is protected by the Roadless Rule, most roadless areas have additional layers of protection such as a wilderness, watershed or recreation designation.
Axelson said getting enough timber supply from the Forest Service has been a persistent issue.
The Association, along with the two largest timber companies left in the region, Viking Lumber and Alcan Timber, sued the Forest Service last March — saying that without enough access to timber, the industry could collapse. A federal judge dismissed the lawsuit this spring. But Axelson said the timber groups are appealing.
"There are long-term commitments that the Forest Plans provide to supply industry at certain levels that have historically not been met, and that makes it also very challenging to run a business," she said.
The Forest Service has said it is not legally obligated to meet industry demand. According to a 2024 U.S. Government Accountability Office report, the Forest Service has not met its annual target for timber sales in Alaska since 2014.
Timber troubles
Axelson said additional factors make logging in Alaska economically difficult.
"We're always at a disadvantage in Southeast in terms of when we're sending anything out of the state into a place like the Lower 48 because of the cost of transportation," she said.
It's expensive to build logging roads. A Viking Lumber spokesperson told KTOO that it costs, on average, $200,000 per mile. Plus, a lot of timber in Alaska has to be transported by boat to be milled.
Tariffs the Trump Administration imposed last year present another obstacle. Many trees logged in Southeast are shipped overseas, especially to Asian countries. Last year, the Forest Service reported that Tongass log exports hit their lowest level ever due to Trump's tariffs on wood products.
Axelson said that has consequences for competition within the U.S.
"Now there's not a market for it because there's so much abundance," Axelson said. "Operators here are sitting on millions of dollars worth of product."
Plus, Axelson said at a recent Southeast Conference timber industry panel that political ping-pong at the national level makes it difficult to plan for the future.
"When we have the back and forth on a four-year cycle — it doesn't matter which side — it creates so many challenges for our communities," she said.
Susan Alexander is a retired Forest Service economist who worked in the Tongass.
She said when the Roadless Rule has flip-flopped under past administrations, getting rid of it didn't ramp up logging in the Tongass. But she said it did prompt the Forest Service to prepare timber sales that never sold.
"There was a heck of a lot of money spent trying to set up timber sales in units that were then taken out because somebody in a later administration rescinded the rule — or put it back."
According to the Forest Service press office, no timber sales occurred in roadless areas within the Tongass when the forest was last exempted from the Roadless Rule by Trump, between 2020 and 2023.
The Forest Service spends about $177 per thousand board-feet to prepare a timber sale in the Tongass, according to a Forest Service spokesperson. Alexander said it adds up to millions per timber sale.
The Forest Service spent more than $600 million on preparing timber sales between 1999 and 2018 and recouped only 5.4% from those sales. That's according to a 2019 report by the Taxpayers for Common Sense, a federal budget watchdog group.
"The timber program in Southeast Alaska has never been centered on revenue generation," said Tongass National Forest Spokesperson Paul Robbins in an email to KTOO. "For decades, its purpose has been to support the economies and livelihoods of remote communities."
Alexander said it's hard to imagine remote trees in roadless areas could compete against cheaper-to-access trees in Canada, New Zealand and other forests along the Pacific Rim.
"It's such a difficult-to-access place with high transportation costs and wood that's going to compete in a global market," she said. "It just doesn't really make a lot of sense."
Areas already close to roads and waterways in the southern part of the Tongass might see logging pick up a bit, Alexander said, if the road ban is lifted long enough for timber to be sold.
Timber vs. tourism
The Forest Service is currently revising its Tongass Forest Management Plan, which sets a vision for land governance over the next decade or so. The agency said in a report that a key reason the forest needs a new plan is that "the regional shift from a timber-based economy to an economy dominated by recreation and tourism has been a profound change for Southeast Alaska since the previous forest plan was finalized."
The timber industry supports fewer than 300 jobs in Southeast Alaska, and the Forest Service reported employment in the sector saw a 65% decline between 2005 and 2021. Meanwhile, the tourism industry supports more than 8,000 jobs in the region.
Many people have said those industries are at odds — like Logan Berner, a forest ecologist at the University of Alaska Southeast.
In the pouring rain, Berner recently tromped through the trees in a roadless area off of Treadwell Ditch Trail to visit a large Sitka spruce he found this summer.
"You can't wrap your arms around that thing, not by a long shot, especially since it's kind of on a cliff," he said with his arms stretched out wide.
Berner said old, intact forests are what millions of visitors come here to see — not clear-cuts.
"They want to look across the landscape and get a feel for what it means to be in a wild place, which has been lost in so many other parts of the world," Berner said.
Even if lifting the Roadless Rule doesn't lead to a large-scale logging boom, Berner said the change in policy raises a question about the value of public land.
"Are we going to target resource extraction at the expense of everything else?" he said. "Or are we going to try to find a balance amongst all these different ways that the lands around us help support society?"
The U.S. Department of Agriculture expects to finalize the Roadless Rule rollback next year.