“Islands Wolf II” lawsuit filed in federal court

by Mike Gaworecki

January 11, 2010

In July 2008, Greenpeace and Cascadia Wildlands Project filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Forest Service alleging that the agency had violated environmental laws in the planning of four logging projects in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, one of the chief habitats of the rare Islands wolf. Today, the two groups, along with the Tongass Conservation Society, have again filed suit to protect the Islands wolf. We’re asking a federal court to stop the so-called Logjam timber project from moving forward.

The Logjam project would allow logging of 3,422 acres on Prince of Wales Island, which has already been subject to heavy logging since the 1950s. In order to move an estimated 73 million more board feet of timber out of the area, 22 miles of new roads would be built. This means that yet again the Forest Service is allowing an ill-conceived timber project to move forward despite the fact that it greatly imperils wildlife like the Islands wolf, the wolves’ primary prey, Sitka black-tailed deer, and local salmon populations.

The following series of images shows the character of the forest already impacted by previous logging (plus natural fragmentation and lower quality forest), followed by the same shots with logging unit boundaries drawn in by hand by our own intrepid Alaska-based forest campaigner, Larry Edwards, as accurately as possible from project maps.

You can check these images out in a larger format here. Read a whole bunch more about the lawsuit and the environmental laws that are violated by the Forest Service’s flawed environmental impact statement (EIS) here.

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