18 



Senator Ted Stevens 



Committee on Energy and Natural Resources 



February 28, 1989 



Mr. Stevens. Mr. Chairman, Alaska's Tongass National 

 Forest has drawn quite a bit of attention during the last 

 few years. The issues, however, are hardly different from 

 those we considered ten years ago when I sat on this 

 Committee. Underlying every discussion of the Tongass 

 during the last three years has been the unstated objective 

 of those who want to revisit and revise the divisions made 

 in 1980 between wilderness and working forest. 



As a nation, we have accepted the need to balance the 

 competing uses of our public lands. Some is preserved, as a 

 few of our colleagues like to say, for future generations to 

 make decisions on. Some is managed to favor certain values, 

 such as wildlife habitat. And finally, some is available 

 for development and use of its resources, both renewable and 

 non-renewable, in ways which protect the rights of other 

 users as well. For many areas of the country -- and I put 

 Alaska in this category -- it has been extraordinarily hard 

 to strike this balance. 



The reasons are simple, and I do not need to review them 

 for the members of this Committee. The point is that 

 Congress made the hard decisions on public lands in Alaska 

 in 1980. In the Tongass, Congress created 5.4 million acres 

 of wilderness, and put approximately one third of the 



