55 



Therefore, we strongly urge the Congress to defer current legisla- 

 tive action and allow the process which was mandated by the Na- 

 tional Forest Management Act to continue until completion of the 

 draft in June, at which time comments will be received from the 

 public. 



George Leonard is prepared to give you more details on the De- 

 partment's views on all of this. Again, thank you for the opportuni- 

 ty to appear here before you today. 



The Chairman. Thank you very much, Ms. Kearney. 



Mr. Leonard. 



STATEMENT OF GEORGE M. LEONARD, ASSOCIATE CHIEF, 

 FOREST SERVICE, DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE 



Mr. Leonard. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I appreciate the oppor- 

 tunity to visit once again about the Tongass National Forest. 



The Tongass is certainly a place of great beauty and of abundant 

 resources. It is of extreme national interest. As Senator Murkowski 

 has noted, it is a land of superlative wilderness. It is a land of tre- 

 mendous salmon fisheries. 



But it also should be recognized that it is a land of highly pro- 

 ductive timber land, land that is well adapted to management on a 

 sustained yield basis. And that is really what the debate is about: 

 How much is going to be wilderness and how much will be man- 

 aged for its timber production? 



On the issue of protecting riparian areas, there is simply no 

 question that the riparian areas on this and other national forests 

 deserve and need special attention. They are highly productive and 

 important to that ecosystem. They are important to that salmon 

 fishery in the Northwest. 



The question is how best to achieve that protection. The Act that 

 we are considering today would mandate the establishment of a 

 100-foot buffer strip adjacent to salmon-producing streams, adja- 

 cent to the tributaries to those streams, and adjacent to streams 

 which support resident fisheries. 



We believe that greater protection of those streams can be 

 achieved through a management scheme which is currently in 

 place on the Tongass, in which site-specific prescriptions for each 

 stream along which any management activity, particularly logging, 

 will take place are prescribed by an inter-disciplinary team made 

 up of wildlife biologists and other resource management specialists. 



We currently have 24 wildlife biologists on the Tongass Forest 

 today. Most of them are directly involved in ensuring that the 

 timber management activities that take place on that forest are 

 done in a way that protects and recognizes the high quality of that 

 fishery. 



The general plan is done in accordance with an aquatic habitat 

 handbook which was developed in cooperation with all of the agen- 

 cies with responsibility for management of that fisheries resource: 

 the Forest Service, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, the 

 U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the National Marine Fisheries 

 Service. 



It's our judgment that this site-specific prescription which recog- 

 nizes the needs of individual streams and which provides that pro- 



