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THE WILDERNESS SOCIETY 



STATEMENT OF JOSEPH R. MEHRKENS, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR 



THE SOUTHEAST ALASKA NATURAL RESOURCES CENTER, 



ON THE PRELIMINARY FINDINGS OF THE TONGASS LAND MANAGEMENT 



PLAN REVISION BEFORE THE HOUSE SUBCOMMITTEE ON 



ENVIRONMENT, ENERGY, AND NATURAL RESOURCE 8 



FEBRUARY 28, 1990. 



Mr. Chairman and members of the Committee, I am Joseph 

 Mehrkens of the Southeast Alaska Natural Resources Center 

 located in Juneau, Alaska. The Center, a joint project of The 

 Wilderness Society and The Underhill Foundation, is dedicated to 

 improving management of resources on the Tongass National 

 Forest. One of our primary objectives is to insure that manage- 

 ment reforms are incorporated into the revised Tongass forest 

 plan. I am speaking here today for The Wilderness Society. 



During the 14 years of my residency in Southeast Alaska, I 

 was employed for 12 years by the U.S. Forest Service on the 

 Tongass National Forest, first as a forest hydrologist and later 

 as the head economist with the program planning and budget staff 

 for the Alaska Region. My extensive experience with the plan- 

 ning process on the Tongass, including involvement with the 

 original Tongass plan, gives me considerable understanding of 

 the problems in the current Tongass plan revision. 



The Forest Service has just released its Analysis of the 

 Management Situation (AMS) for the Tongass National Forest. 

 This document is supposed to describe the capabilities of the 

 agency to resolve resource use conflicts and establish the 

 bounds of planning alternatives. However, the AMS fails to 

 achieve these objectives. It does not provide even basic 

 documentation of how the information presented was derived and 

 offers no factual basis by which the public can evaluate poten- 

 tial resource use conflicts. It does not discuss the most 

 fundamental economic and environmental tradeoffs between 

 competing resource uses. Most importantly, the AMS ignores the 

 fact that management of the Tongass is driven by two 50-year, 

 long-term timber sale contracts that require large, multi- 

 million dollar subsidies each year. Compounding the 

 inadequacies of the AMS, the Forest Service produced a slick, 

 magazine style "user friendly" AMS that contains virtually no 



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