LA Weekly

On the letters page of the Anchorage Daily News, you can learn more about environmental politics than you can reading -- well, anything I write in the LA Weekly, for sure, but probably better things, too (I don't want to dis any one magazine). I read the letters regularly, because they end up in my news aggregators which ask for certain terms ("timber harvest" is one).

I found this one especially instructive, in light of the heavy federal subsidies Alaskans enjoy (California, by contrast, is a "donor state.") I especially liked the very last line. Because it's true.

Alaska's Republican Rep. Don Young is livid since Congress voted against funding Forest Service roads on the Tongass National Forest. He is threatening reprisals right and left ("Young promises reprisal for vote," May 19). Rep. Young supports most logging not in his own backyard, but he drew the line when it came to salvage logging on the Chugak National Forest.

Rep. Young strongly supports funding for a Tongass timber program that took in $400,000 in revenue last year but spent either $20 million or over $40 million, depending on whose numbers you use. The higher figure equals $150,000 for every Tongass timber job and is in fact a subsidy. He justifies this as "building for the future." So much for his sanctimonious lip service to fiscal conservatism; it's just taxpayers' money after all and those corporate donors really need the subsidies.

The Tongass timber industry has been in decline for over a decade. Rep. Young blames "extreme environmentalists" who have questioned this insanity for years. But Tongass logging is uneconomical, even subsidized and at today's inflated lumber costs. Environmentalists are merely convenient scapegoats.

Isn't it ironic that those "extreme environmentalists" are the real fiscal conservatives?
-- Erik Lie-Nielsen
Juneau

By the way, who knew May 11 was "Endangered Species Day"? And that the red-headed woodpecker is about to be listed? Not me.

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