The Tongass National Forest is a 17 million-acre temperate rainforest covering most of Southeast Alaska. It’s managed by the U.S. Forest Service, which is revising its long-term plan for the Tongass. The previous plan is 25 years old and was revised in 2016. It’s 516 pages long.
The agency will spend the rest of this year gathering public input and then take the next couple of years to finalize a new plan. The U.S. Forest Service is partnering with Spruce Root and Juneau Economic Development Council to help with public engagement. Spruce Root is a regional non-profit focused on the economy, and it’s sharing a survey to find out what people think about the Tongass.
Barb Miranda is the Deputy Forest Supervisor for the Tongass. She spoke with CoastAlaska’s Angela Denning about the Forest Service’s process to make a new plan. She says the entire thing relies on public input.
Listen:
Barb Miranda: For the first time in over 25 years, we’re gonna go through a major overhaul of the Tongass Forest Management Plan. So, the things that have changed in those 25 years — think about every town in Southeast Alaska, their economy, the tourism demands that have changed. The way we’ve extracted resources from the Tongass has shifted remarkably, in those 25 years. 25 years ago was the end of the pulp mill industry. Now we’re looking at second growth, wood and how to utilize that in our local economies and for local sawmills, the climate, our understanding of climate change, and how that’s impacting the forest around us and the waterways around us has changed. Our population has shifted, and there’s an increased demand for recreation, conservation and restoration on our Forest lands. So, we’re revising a 25-year-old plan with the new planning rule that will give us a plan for the next 15 or so years.
Angela Denning: So why should somebody in any town in Southeast care about what’s in this plan?
BM: Well, I mean, as we all know, those of us that live here in Southeast, the Tongass is our backyard, our playground, and most of the land surrounding our small communities is the Tongass National Forest. So if you care about what happens, you know what kind of actions can take place in the area immediately around your town, or those places that are special to you and special to all of us, where we go berry picking, foraging, the access to cabins, all those things are going to be included in this in this high level plan and will guide how the Tongass is managed for the next 15 or so years.
AD: What is the public process like for this long-term plan? I know community meetings have been held throughout Southeast in April. How can the public get involved now?
BM: Yeah, great question. We’re in a marathon, not a sprint for the forest plan. We are in the first phase of forest plan revision. And we’re in a phase called assessment. Like you said, we just completed our community workshops across Southeast Alaska. We’ve got a couple left. But we’ve done about 25 community workshops. And everybody will be able to see the information we’ve received at those workshops synthesized into report out here in the next couple of months. But we also have on our website, webinars, other information, a library, how to be involved, you can sign up to receive notifications about this, in addition to that we have office hours, twice a month, the schedule is on that website, where people can tune in, and our planning team will be there ready to answer any questions folks might have about the Forest Plan Revision.
AD: How long do people have to make comments? And when do you plan to have the plan done?
BM: So right now, like I said, we’re in that first phase of planning, which is the assessment phase. It’s open. We are taking comments throughout this whole year, we will have the draft assessment available for review in January of 2025. So, information to feed into the assessments is most valuable between now and then. Hopefully, you know, the fall would be when we’re finalizing, gathering information and then synthesizing those into a document.
AD: Thanks for sharing a lot of information with us. Is there anything you’d like to add that we haven’t talked about?
BM: There’s one more thing. The Forest Service is pretty committed to engaging — robustly — differently than we have in the past. And this plan can’t be created without public input. So, community voices, tribal voices, citizen voices are really important. We can’t create this plan without it. So (we) really want folks to lean in with us to develop this plan together.
