00:00:57.400Hello, this is Ayana Young, and I welcome you to Unlearn and Rewild, where we explore
00:01:03.880radical ideas relating to earth renewal.
00:01:07.360Today we will take an in-depth look at the Tongass National Forest in southeast Alaska,
00:01:12.900which has been called the crown jewel of American forests.
00:01:16.620The largest of U.S. national forests, it consists of one-third of the world's coastal temperate
00:01:22.540rainforest ecosystem, which only occurs in 3% of Earth's landmass. The Tongass has already had1.00
00:01:30.200nearly half of its very large old-growth trees cut down due to a process known as high-grading,
00:01:37.100where loggers remove the oldest and largest trees from the forest. These trees are often essential
00:01:44.000to the ecosystem, simply because they are so large and provide vital habitats for woodland creatures.
00:01:51.160Last month, an Alaska court approved further logging of this rare heritage old growth that has just begun and will continue for 10 years, unless we organize a strong pushback.
00:02:04.860Joining us today to fill us in about this top priority conservation issue is Tom Waldo, Senior Staff Attorney with Earth Justice in Alaska.
00:02:15.320Tom graduated from Dartmouth College in 1981 and Stanford Law School in 1987.
00:02:21.900Tom clerked for Alaska Supreme Court Chief Justice Jay Rabinowitz in 1987 to 88.
00:02:29.100From 1988 to 89, he worked for the Minnesota Attorney's General Office as counsel to Department of Public Service.
00:02:36.780In 1989, Tom moved back to Alaska to join the Earth Justice team.
00:02:41.600he develops and litigates a variety of cases in state and federal courts and administrative
00:02:47.320agencies to protect Alaska's public lands, wildlife, and air, and water quality. Cases
00:02:55.080in his docket have included protection of roadless areas and old growth habitat in the Tongass
00:03:00.320and Chuga National Forest, prevention of illegal disposals of state public domain lands,
00:03:06.100and protection of water bodies from acid mine drainage and other mine-related water pollution.
00:03:15.580Hello, Ayana, and thank you for having me.
00:03:18.280So just to get started on the foundational level,
00:03:22.060what is Earthjustice and what is your role in this incredible organization?
00:03:27.660Earthjustice is a national nonprofit environmental law firm.
00:03:32.760We represent clients around the country in lawsuits and administrative appeals and providing legal advice on claims relating to protection of natural resources, basically protecting fish and wildlife, clean air, clean water, and healthy communities.
00:03:52.800We have over 90 lawyers in 12 offices around the country and a caseload of about 300 cases with over 1,000 clients.
00:04:02.360We represent our clients without charge on cases to protect the environment.
00:04:08.660My role is I'm a staff attorney in the Alaska office and work on issues here in Alaska.
00:04:15.960Well, wonderful. And I know a crucial campaign you're working currently on is to protect the Tongass National Forest.
00:04:23.640But to give the audience a wider scope, perhaps you could start by explaining where the Tongass National Forest is and what makes it so unique geologically and ecologically.
00:04:36.160Sure. The Tongass constitutes most of the panhandle of southeast Alaska.
00:04:42.520It's by far the biggest national forest in the country.
00:04:50.500It's about the size of the state of West Virginia.
00:04:54.200If you look at a map of Alaska and you see that panhandle down in the southeast corner, more than 80 percent of that land is the Tongass National Forest.
00:05:04.760So part of what makes it unique is its huge size.
00:05:07.700We're way bigger than any other national forest.
00:05:13.500Most of the forest is a chain of islands called the Alexander Archipelago along the coast of southeast Alaska.
00:05:22.380They are mountainous islands divided by ocean channels, and we have a diversity of landscapes, including glaciers and ice fields, mountains, forests, and salmon streams.
00:05:36.320It's a temperate rainforest, which is a relatively rare forest system worldwide.
00:05:43.940We have really a substantial component of the remaining intact temperate rainforest in the world located right here in southeast Alaska.
00:05:54.060As its name suggests, we get lots and lots of rain here coming off the Pacific Ocean.
00:07:17.080Now, I'd also like to go into the history of logging and resource extraction in the Tongass,
00:07:22.620perhaps shedding some light on the 1989 sale of old-growth forests for pulp in Sitka.
00:07:29.000And also, maybe we could talk about the 2003 Bush administration
00:07:33.800temporary exemption from the nationwide roadless area conservation rule.
00:07:38.660Sure. History of logging in the Tongass.
00:07:43.300Well, it goes all the way back to the 19th century.
00:07:48.080As long as people were here, they were cutting down trees at some level.
00:07:53.280In the earlier parts of the 20th century, you had small operations that basically just high-graded the most accessible and valuable trees they could get at,
00:08:04.620but at a relatively small scale and serving largely local needs.
00:08:09.440For decades, the Forest Service tried to entice a larger industry to come to the Tongass.
00:08:17.500And they recognized they had the problem that although these giant old-growth trees contain rich and valuable timber,
00:08:25.320there's also a lot of what they call defect, that is the wood that is not good for sawing into lumber.
00:08:32.140And so you need a paper mill or a pulp mill or something like that to make it really an economically optimal operation.
00:08:41.680And it was because of our remote location and because of these remote islands that are difficult to get access to and the relatively scattered locations of the valuable trees, it was actually hard to establish a timber industry here.
00:08:57.220The way they finally did it was in the post-war years, they enticed two companies to build giant pulp mills in the Tongass, one in Sitka and one in Ketchikan.
00:09:09.620And the way they enticed them to do that was with 50-year timber sale contracts.
00:09:15.900These were unique in the national forest system.
00:09:19.240There's no other forest that has timber contracts that long.
00:09:23.940And it was by offering these mills this long-term supply at dirt cheap prices that they were
00:09:34.640When those mills came, starting in the late 1950s, that's when industrial-scale logging in the Tongass took off, and we saw just an explosion of logging during that time.
00:09:51.480It peaked in the 1970s, cutting around 500 or 600 million board feet a year, and has been on a decline ever since then.
00:10:03.040And in the 1990s, those pulp mills that had been built in the post-war years had become obsolete.
00:10:12.160They were inefficient in the world markets, and it was going to cost a great deal to upgrade them to make them comply with requirements for clean air and clean water.
00:10:24.000And in addition, the pulp mills had cut over all of the very best and most valuable and most accessible old growth in the forest
00:10:32.440so that they didn't have as rich and valuable a source of resource anymore.
00:10:37.580So as a result, those mills closed in the 1990s, one in 1993, the other in 1997.
00:10:43.980And what we've seen since that time throughout the 2000s is a level of logging back to about what it was before they built the pulp mills, around 30, 35 million board feet a year in recent years.
00:11:00.260But what's being cut now is the remainder of what is now a significantly degraded ecosystem that's the result of nearly 50 years of logging under these long-term contracts that focused on the very best old growth stands in the Tongass.
00:11:20.760Wow. Well, just to imagine these magnificent old growth turning into pulp nonetheless is really hard for me to believe.
00:11:30.260And would you also speak about the Bush administration's exemption
00:11:34.980from the nationwide roadless conservation rule
00:11:37.820and how that played a role in the logging and resource extraction?
00:11:44.980When, as I mentioned, the last of the pulp mills closed in 1997,
00:11:50.560and it was right around that time that the Clinton administration
00:11:55.100began considering what became the roadless area conservation rule
00:12:00.200which is a rule that was adopted at the end of the Clinton administration, protecting roadless areas in the national forests from most logging and most road construction.
00:12:14.380Roadless areas are the places that, as the name suggests, they don't have roads.
00:12:17.960They're the places that still remain wild and pristine, largely.
00:12:22.500In the Tongass, we have way more roadless areas than any other national forest, 9.6 million acres.
00:12:29.080And it was very controversial at that time whether the Tongass would be included in the roadless rule.
00:12:34.240And the reason for that was a lot of the logging in the Tongass was, most of the logging at that time was still being done by punching new roads into backcountry, wild, pristine areas and high grading out the very best old growth that was there.
00:12:49.620So the conservation movement nationally made a big effort to get the Tongass included in the roadless rule and that paid off.
00:12:58.240at the end of the Clinton administration, the decision was made that the Tongass would be
00:13:02.940included. Well, the Bush administration that took office shortly after the rule went into place
00:13:09.780didn't support the roadless rule generally and specifically did not support its application
00:13:15.040to the Tongass. So in 2003, the Bush administration adopted what they called at that time
00:13:22.580a temporary exemption for the Tongass from the roadless rule nationally. And it was supposed to0.77
00:13:29.600be temporary while they figured out what their long-term plan was going to be for dealing with
00:13:35.200roadless areas on the Tongass. But because that was never actually resolved, the temporary Tongass
00:13:42.640exemption became the de facto permanent rule. And we were seeing the Bush administration
00:13:49.080repeatedly focusing on trying to offer new timber sales,
00:13:55.880punching new roads into backcountry, pristine, wild areas,
00:14:00.740and continuing that old practice of logging out the best, biggest, old-growth forest sands they could find.
00:14:09.080We pushed back very hard on that with a lot of lawsuits in the early 2000s.
00:14:16.120trying to stop roadless area logging on the forest and ultimately brought a legal challenge
00:14:22.020to the validity of that 2003 Tongass exemption. That challenge remains caught up in the courts
00:14:29.940right now. At this time, there's still an order in place that we won from the district court that
00:14:35.680the Tongass exemption was invalid. It was adopted on arbitrary grounds. And the roadless rule,
00:14:41.660as a result, remains in effect in the Tongass at this time. However, that question is now pending
00:14:47.700before an 11-judge panel on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, and we're waiting for a ruling
00:14:53.780at this time, ultimately, as to the validity of that exemption. If we were to lose this case
00:15:00.580before this 11-judge panel in the Ninth Circuit, then the Tongass exemption would come back into
00:15:06.860place and it would be permissible for the forest service to start offering timber sales in roadless
00:15:12.980areas again. They haven't tried to do that in quite a few years now. I think they have recognized
00:15:18.540that it is immensely controversial for them to try to offer timber sales in roadless areas.
00:15:24.280It always causes them problems and they have shifted their focus recently away from that.
00:15:30.580but heaven knows we don't want to take our chances on that
00:15:34.740because so much of those kind of decisions can depend on
00:16:44.640So it's only about half of what is logged in the Tongass that actually stays here and gets some local processing that creates a small number of local jobs at the sawmills in the region.
00:16:58.760And those, you know, they're made into things like door frames and window frames and lumber.
00:18:19.020What are the long-term ramifications on the ecosystem in the Tongass?
00:18:37.240You know, including the watersheds, the wildlife, indigenous way of life.
00:18:41.880What is really being lost here by this resource extraction?
00:18:46.600well what's being lost is permanent and irreplaceable these stands include trees that
00:18:57.480may be 700 years old or older sometimes to when you clear cut a stand of old growth forest
00:19:06.040it takes probably, it takes about 150 years before it begins to get the values of an old
00:19:16.640growth forest again, and really at least 250 years or longer before it really has the full
00:19:23.160habitat value of the forest that you cut. Now, so that means that when we decide,
00:19:30.780When our generation decides that we're going to clear-cut these old-growth forests, we're making decisions that not only affect us and our children, but our grandchildren and our great-grandchildren and our great-great-grandchildren.
00:19:46.780The impacts of this on fish and wildlife are substantial.
00:19:52.620There are a lot of species that are associated with and dependent on the old-growth forests.
00:19:59.460But perhaps the one with maybe the most local significance here is, believe it or not, deer.
00:20:07.100In southeast Alaska, the local species of deer called the Sitka black-tailed deer is highly dependent on old-growth forests.
00:20:14.680And the reason for that is it's the old-growth forests where they go to survive over the winter.
00:20:20.780These old-growth forests have trees of varying sizes, which means you get a mixed canopy.
00:20:26.800It allows some sunshine to reach the forest floor, which means there's forage there that deer can feed on.
00:20:35.060But it also means that these great big trees, they have giant limbs and branches that intercept a lot of snow,
00:20:41.580so that in a hard winter, the old-growth forest stands are where the deer can go,
00:20:46.640that they're able to walk around and not be bogged down in snow, and also able to find food.
00:20:52.160So they're vitally important for deer populations in southeast Alaska.
00:20:58.860In turn, there is another species that depends a lot on the deer, which is our local subspecies of wolf called the Alexander Archipelago wolf.
00:21:08.980And the deer is the primary species on which the wolf preys in southeast Alaska.
00:21:17.020As a result of that, what we are now coming to grips with in this region after 50 years of logging much of the best habitat in the forest is a real conflict where there are not enough deer to go around, both for wolves and for human hunting demand.
00:21:37.900And, you know, the hunting of deer is very important to the local, rural subsistence way of life in southeast Alaska.
00:21:45.500It's what fills people's freezers with meat for the winter.
00:25:17.080people who are the shareholders in these corporations
00:25:20.300They might live in Anchorage or Seattle or San Francisco or not necessarily in the community where the land is.
00:25:27.300And similarly, the people who live in those communities are often not shareholders.
00:25:32.720And so there's been this kind of separation of the people from the land on the native corporation lands.
00:25:39.580And those native corporation lands have been logged over at a very unsustainable pace, even worse than the Forest Service.
00:25:48.320So there's a mixture of how the Alaska Natives have related to the forest in southeast Alaska.
00:25:57.520So kind of zooming out a bit, how is climate change affecting the Tongass National Forest?
00:26:03.780Well, it's a little hard to say in the long-term or big picture, but one thing that has been noticed for sure is that it appears to be causing the decline of one of the really valuable tree species here, Alaska yellow cedar.
00:26:22.760What happens is, as a result of climate change, we're getting less snowpack than we used to.
00:26:28.740And that diminished snowpack, ironically, is actually causing those trees sometimes to freeze in the springtime.
00:26:36.880And they should historically have had good thermal cover from that snow that would protect them.
00:26:44.620They don't have that anymore, and they're dying back.
00:26:48.600There's been a petition actually to list the Alaska Yellow Cedar as a threatened or endangered species as a result of this dieback.
00:26:58.280But in the long term, it's a little hard to say what the impacts of climate change will be on the Tongass.
00:27:04.720One thing you should know about the Tongass relating to climate change, though, is because it's such a lush forested ecosystem,
00:27:14.580this temperate rainforest, it stores a vast amount of carbon. And so one of the effects
00:27:21.520of logging old growth forests on the Tongass is it actually contributes to climate change.
00:27:29.000And by protecting these old growth forests, we can actually help preserve a kind of buffer
00:27:35.340against climate change. And because of the latitude and the Pacific Ocean influence,
00:27:43.200Do you think the Tongass could be a lifeboat for biodiversity in the event of significant warming?
00:27:50.260Well, sure. Yeah. I mean, you always want to try to save all the pieces. And that's what we're
00:27:56.140trying to do here is trying to protect as much as we can of the remaining roadless areas and of the
00:28:01.380old growth forests and allow places where you'll have refugia that species can adapt as climate
00:28:10.080it changes. It's actually a pretty challenging place for adaptation because it is naturally a
00:28:18.000very fragmented island ecosystem. It's not a real easy place for wildlife to migrate through.
00:28:27.840And are there any restoration projects going on to help repair the existing ecological damage?
00:28:33.900Yes, and hopefully more, hopefully a growing amount of this kind of restoration work.
00:28:41.880There's a fair amount of stream restoration work that can be done, can do things like restore natural pools that would have occurred from trees.
00:28:55.280They used to believe that trees in the streams were a very bad thing, and they would actually clear them out of the streams.
00:29:01.760But we now know that trees in the streams are a good thing. They create pools. They provide woody debris. They're essential for salmon habitat, for salmon spawning and rearing.
00:29:12.740And so there are restoration projects going on, trying to restore streams that have been diverted by roads, trying to replace culverts that have collapsed and are blocking stream flow.
00:29:32.400There are trying to restore natural stream beds and actually putting trees back in streams where they were cleared out in the past.
00:29:42.740In addition to the stream restoration, there are attempts to try to improve the wildlife habitat from the clear cutting of old growth in the past.
00:29:55.780Now, there's really very little that can be done here, but there are efforts to try to thin those second growth stands to do something to restore a little bit more of diversity of tree size to the stand.
00:30:11.080Now, there's only so much you can do there. As a practical matter, it takes hundreds of years for those stands to come back. And there is not really good scientific evidence to support the efficacy of thinning those second growth stands to try to nudge along old growth conditions a little bit.
00:30:31.740But there are studies underway on the impact of that, and there are efforts to try to thin the existing stands in the hopes of being able to improve that habitat a little bit.
00:30:43.980Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?
00:30:57.720And where have you been, my darling young one?
00:31:04.440I've stumbled on the side of twelve misty mountains.
00:31:08.960I've walked and I've crawled on six crooked highways
00:31:15.580I've stepped in the middle of seven sad forests
00:31:22.220I've been out in front of a dozen dead oceans
00:31:30.880I've been ten thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard
00:31:35.720And it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard rain that's gonna fall.
00:31:50.920Oh, what did you see, my blue-eyed son
00:31:59.940And what did you see, my darling young one
00:32:06.840I saw a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it
00:32:15.780I saw highway diamonds with nobody on it
00:32:20.680I saw a black branch with blood that kept dripping
00:32:27.040I saw a room full of men with their hammers a-bleeding
00:32:33.900I saw a white ladder all covered with water
00:32:42.960I saw ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken
00:32:47.320I saw guns and chopped swords in the hands of young children
00:37:25.560So the idea of offering the biggest old growth timber sale in 20 years is just completely incompatible with the rhetoric of making a rapid transition away from old growth logging.
00:37:38.060So we're doing what we can to try to urge the Forest Service to make a faster transition.
00:37:43.880There's a planning process underway right now.
00:37:46.280We expect to see a draft environmental impact statement come out this summer on a plan amendment that would provide for a transition away from old growth logging on the Tongass.
00:37:59.980We're concerned that right now they're thinking about that in much too long terms.
00:38:04.500They're thinking about it in 10 to 15 years.
00:38:09.220we're hopeful that there will be alternatives that would enable it to happen faster and that
00:38:14.680we can get the public involved in fighting for a truly rapid transition out of this practice of
00:38:21.380old growth logging. And when would they actually start logging and how long would it take them to
00:38:29.720logged the 6,000 acres? Well, I'm sorry to say that they were scheduled to start logging it on
00:38:39.380April 18th of this year. We filed a lawsuit trying to stop that timber sale. We lost the lawsuit in
00:38:50.280the district court. We've appealed it to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. We sought an injunction
00:38:55.960pending appeal, but we were not successful in obtaining that. And so, as far as I know,
00:39:01.820the logging on that project has already started. Now, it is a big project. They're thinking of it
00:39:07.900as lasting as long as 10 years. So, this summer, there will only be a portion of that that will
00:39:16.700be logged. There will still be plenty left to protect. So, we're going to fight on in the
00:39:22.640lawsuit. The thing that we lost this spring was really just a short-term injunction for the period
00:39:29.200pending our work on the appeal of the case. We didn't get that, but we're moving forward with
00:39:35.480getting the appeal resolved on the merits and hopefully getting that sale set aside
00:39:40.100so that the next nine years worth of logging don't happen there.
00:39:44.380how much can this 6 000 acres really be worth compared to what we're losing in terms of not
00:39:54.200just the majestic beauty and ecosystem services that old growth provides but the wildlife the
00:40:01.980tourism the local communities that are losing money off these sales it's just it's kind of
00:40:07.880mind-blowing how this could have even been passed when it just doesn't seem to add up
00:40:12.660You're right. It doesn't add up financially. I'll say a couple things about that.
00:40:17.560But first about the environmental effects of this, the timber sale is located right in the heart of what had in the past been the best habitat and population stronghold of wolves in southeast Alaska.
00:40:34.500It so happens in a very bad luck way for the wolves that their habitat is located largely
00:40:40.680right where the most valuable trees on the Tongass are.
00:40:44.020And this sale is on a place called Prince of Wales Island, which is the biggest island
00:40:49.620It's the fourth biggest island in the entire United States.
00:40:52.820But the population numbers of wolves on that island have decreased dramatically.
00:40:58.100It's been a place that has been very heavily logged in the past.
00:41:02.220There's been a tremendous amount of habitat loss, and the best experts on the subject are saying that this species is right at the brink of being able to be viable on Prince of Wales Island and in southeast Alaska generally.
00:41:18.780In fact, the Fish and Wildlife Service is considering a petition now to list the wolf as a threatened or endangered species, and that has been the main focus of our lawsuit against the big thorn sale.
00:41:32.220As to the economics of it, you're absolutely right.
00:41:36.300The timber industry associated with the Tongass timber sale program only employs about 100 people by the Forest Service's own reckoning.
00:41:46.160That's people who work in the sawmills in the region and loggers who cut the trees.
00:46:29.360Oh, if you would, and you could, straighten my new mind's eye
00:46:59.360I'm wondering what type of activism has been going on up there.
00:47:27.900Has there been direct action? I know you've been talking about litigation.
00:47:32.900We work very closely with several other mostly conservation-related organizations in trying to
00:47:39.600protect the resources here, and they include local groups like the Southeast Alaska Conservation
00:47:44.880Council, as well as national groups like the Natural Resources Defense Council, Trout Unlimited,
00:47:52.900the National Audubon Society, and others. Greenpeace, Center for Biological Diversity,
00:48:02.700Sierra Club has played an important role. So there's quite a lot of organizations. We try to
00:48:07.660work closely with local communities where we can. We've got native villages, tribal governments as
00:48:15.120allies on many of these issues. There's a good coalition of folks working together on this.
00:48:22.120There's been very little in the way of direct action in response to your question about that. There has been a little bit, but it has not been a focus of the advocacy up here. There has been a litigation campaign that we've talked about, but mostly right now we've got organizations trying to engage in this public process that's underway on the Congress right now that I mentioned before.
00:48:49.500They're actively working on a plan amendment process with the stated purpose of hastening the transition away from old growth logging.
00:49:00.740And as long as there's a public process like that, the best thing we can do is try to influence that process to get it to come out with the best possible result.
00:49:12.720And that means trying to get the word out by me talking to people like you.
00:49:17.080And it means communicating with the decision makers locally.
00:49:21.580And we're in Washington, D.C., and it means trying to get people to send in letters and petitions.
00:49:28.120And we're doing what we can with the resources we have available to try to steer this process in the right direction.
00:49:36.240And one question I forgot to mention when you were speaking about the wolves.
00:49:40.140If the wolves were to be deemed endangered, would that prevent logging from going on in their habitat?
00:49:48.000Well, it would not necessarily cause an immediate halt to all logging, but it certainly would require the Forest Service to adopt a plan that the Fish and Wildlife Service could say was consistent with the recovery, the protection and recovery of the species.
00:50:12.060So it would certainly, as a practical matter, have to require reduced old-growth logging in the Tongass, because it's that old-growth logging is fundamentally at the root of the habitat problem for the wolves.
00:50:25.160right and i know down here in california if you have the northern spotted owl in your forest you
00:50:33.020know you can't log the surrounding area so i wasn't sure if maybe that worked in the same way
00:50:37.700as a wolf although obviously they're different creatures with different patterns of movement
00:50:42.520yeah and then of course the spotted owl helped precipitate the transition away from old growth
00:50:49.040logging in the pacific northwest um you know i hope that we don't have to have uh an endangered
00:50:57.100wolf that's so perilously close to uh losing its viability that it has to be listed under the act
00:51:06.820in order to to stop old growth logging you know it probably does need to be listed but the best
00:51:13.860thing would be to protect the forest and the habitat that it has for the protection of the
00:51:18.620local uses and the resource in its own right. It's too bad that we have to have endangered
00:51:26.960species petitions to finally bring about more sensible management of these resources.
00:51:33.020Yeah, absolutely. So moving away from the Tongass for a minute, what are some other0.54
00:51:38.560environmental campaigns that are going on in Alaska that Earthjustice is a part of,
00:51:43.560whether that's pebble mine or arctic drilling or overfishing, mining, et cetera?
00:53:03.920You have diminishing daylight hours as you get on towards winter.
00:53:07.740And you have a place where there's no infrastructure available to address an oil spill.
00:53:15.220If you think about the Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico, well, that occurred in a place where there's a tremendously well-developed oil industry and all the infrastructure associated with it in an area with lots of ports and ships and population and people who live there and the resources on hand to try to clean up an oil spill.
00:53:37.380and they couldn't do it there. If they couldn't do it in the deep water horizon, they'd never be
00:53:41.940able to do it in the Arctic Ocean. And moreover, it's just the wrong direction for us to go.
00:53:46.980It's energy policy. Instead of trying to pursue more fossil fuels in these remote,
00:53:52.440difficult to get at places like the Arctic, we need to be making the shift to a clean energy
00:53:57.100economy. Third, you mentioned fishing. We're working on issues in the North Pacific, trying
00:54:04.240to protect marine mammals and the stellar sea lion in particular from fishing by the industrial
00:54:11.760trawl fishery in the region. That fishery takes billions of pounds of fish out of the ocean and
00:54:20.000we've got a stellar sea lion population that's endangered in the western part of the state and
00:54:26.380is on the decline and we're trying to protect that species and also trying to reduce bycatch
00:54:33.680of salmon and halibut on the industrial trawl fleet. Bycatch is the incidental catch of species
00:54:42.120that they're not actually targeting. And we lose a lot of valuable salmon and halibut that way
00:54:47.580through that incidental bycatch when they're targeting other species. We're also working
00:54:53.100in Alaska fighting coal mining as well. Alaska has a huge, has probably half of the coal resources
00:55:00.880in the United States and a substantial part of the world's coal resources. The great majority of it
00:55:09.220is undeveloped at this point, but there are several projects proposed out there to try to
00:55:14.800develop these coal resources. Coal mining causes a terrible impact on the environment in the way of
00:55:21.800water pollution and disruption of the incredibly valuable salmon resources that we have here in
00:55:27.960Alaska. And again, as with drilling in the Arctic, it's just the wrong direction for our country to
00:55:33.220be taking to be developing more fossil fuel resources. And we're doing what we can here
00:55:38.760to try to keep the coal in the ground. Well, I really can't thank you enough and Earthjustice
00:55:44.920for taking on these huge issues that affect all of us, even if we're not in Alaska. And I know
00:55:51.420that the Unlearn and Rewild audience will be pumped up after this conversation to get involved. So
00:55:57.740what can the public do beyond signing petitions, but of course, that's important as well,
00:56:03.580to, you know, to stand in defense of the Tongass, which is this global heritage site and beyond?
00:56:10.640It's a great time to be asking that question, because there actually is a process underway
00:56:16.580on the Tongass, in which we have an opportunity to try to influence the agency and the Obama0.98
00:56:21.260administration to make a legacy decision here to finally get us out of this anachronistic practice
00:56:29.160of old growth logging. Write letters to the chief of the forest service or the secretary of
00:56:35.880agriculture asking to stop logging on the Tongass. Participate in the process when there's a public
00:56:41.980comment period coming up. We'll be having a draft EIS coming out this summer and there'll be a chance