The Tongass is more than a local issue. It is not just any national 

 forest. It is the largest one, it has internationally important wild- 

 life and fishery resources. Its management has made it one of the 

 most expensive of all our national forests to run, and in an era 

 when we are trying hard to find a way to create more balanced 

 plans for every national forest — plans that are responsive to the 

 growing public demand for and economic importance of fisheries, 

 recreation, tourism, wildlife and other values — the Tongass stands 

 out as hamstrung in its ability to respond to that challenge. I be- 

 lieve the Tongass is hamstrung because all its planning and man- 

 agement revolves around three things unique to this forest: the 

 rigid goal of having to supply 4.5 billion board feet of timber for 

 sale per decade, the automatic provision of at least $40 million per 

 year for timber programs and the fifty-year contracts which give 

 two timber buyers exclusive control of large parts of the forest. 



The legislation does five things: it eliminates the now-mandatory 

 timber goal of 4.5 billion board feet per decade; eliminates the 

 guaranteed minimum annual appropriation of $40 million; termi- 

 nates the two 50-year timber contracts so that timber will be sold 

 through the normal process of short-term contracts. It requires the 

 Forest Service to revise its land management plan to adjust to not 

 having the mandatory timber goal, the guaranteed appropriation 

 or the long-term contracts and also to achieve a balance between 

 timber, wildlife, fisheries, recreation and other uses and values of 

 the forest. And finally the legislation places 23 areas off-limits to 

 logging until this new plan is completed. The legislation does not 

 put any lands in wilderness. It does not put any lands off-limits to 

 logging permanently but it would insure that logging under the old 

 plan does not eliminate the options for protecting these particular- 

 ly important areas for fisheries, wildlife, recreation and subsistence 

 use. 



These five proposals were made in the hope that they would pro- 

 tect resources in the Tongass National Forest which are important 

 to Alaska's economy and that they would enable the Tongass to 

 adjust to a future which, whether legislation passes or not, is cer- 

 tainly going to be different than the past. 



In the past the forest was run for the timber industry. It is be- 

 coming apparent that we cannot do that and expect everyone else 

 to do just fine. Now the commercial fishermen, the tourism indus- 

 try, the subsistence user and the hunters and fishermen of this 

 area want to be partners in the management of the forest because 

 they all depend on the forest as much as the timber industry does. 



In the past. Congress thought that pouring money into the 

 timber program of this forest and other forests would solve all local 

 economic problems and provide community stability, but now we 

 have to justify every Federal dollar spent as a good investment. 

 The taxpayers in every state demand that and it is their money. 



And lastly, in the past Alaska was far away from the rest of the 

 country. It is still far away but now people in every part of Amer- 

 ica know about Alaska and are interested in it and care about its 

 environment. They know about the oil spill and they know about 

 this forest. It is their forest, too, and they want it to be protected 

 from harm. 



