Efforts to dismantle longstanding protections for Alaska’s wild landscapes continue. The latest, by Alaska’s senior Republican senator, Lisa Murkowski, would deprive nearly 15 million acres of mostly pristine national forest lands of coverage by a 2001 rule that prohibits road construction and commercial logging on those tracts.

Should she fail, Alaska is seeking to erect a backstop to accomplish her goal administratively. The state recently asked the Department of Agriculture, which runs the United States Forest Service, the agency I once oversaw, to exempt the Tongass National Forest from the 2001 regulation, the Roadless Area Conservation Rule.

This is bad not only for Alaska’s forests but for the state’s economy and American taxpayers, who will end up subsidizing, through road building, the exploitation of these landscapes. Twenty-five percent of all the salmon caught on the West Coast come from streams on the Tongass. Maintaining healthy salmon runs should be the priority for the future management of the Tongass. Clearcutting old-growth trees represents the past.

The principal target of Senator Murkowski’s efforts, contained in proposals for inclusion in appropriations legislation making its way through Congress, is the Tongass, the nation’s largest national forest, 16.7 million acres of mostly wild land along the Inside Passage of Alaska’s southeastern coast. About 9.5 million acres is classified as roadless under the 2001 rule. Alaska’s other national forest, the Chugach, has about 5.4 million acres of roadless lands that would also be opened to road building.