A federal judge in Alaska ruled late Wednesday against a Trump administration plan to open 1.8 million acres of America's largest national forest to logging.

The Forest Service plan targeted part of the Tongass National Forest on Prince of Wales Island. It would have been the largest sale of national forest timber in 30 years, Earthjustice pointed out, permitting 164 miles of new roads and clearing an area of forest three times the size of Manhattan, more than half of it old growth. But U.S. District Court Judge Sharon Gleason ruled that the plan violated the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) because the agency did not take all of its potential impacts into account, The Hill reported.

"The magnificent, ancient forests of the Tongass just got a reprieve from the chain saws," Randi Spivak, public lands director at the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD), said in the Earthjustice press release. "We're thrilled the court agreed that the Trump administration broke the law when it approved cutting thousands of acres of old-growth trees. It's critical to protect our remaining old-growth forests to have any chance of stopping the extinction crisis and slowing climate change."

Carrol Inlet in the Tongass National Forest on Aug. 9, 2018. Brock Martin, USFS

"By not developing actual site-specific information, the Forest Service limited its ability to make informed decisions regarding impacts to subsistence uses and presented local communities with vague, hypothetical, and over-inclusive representations of the project's effects over a 15-year period," Gleason wrote. Gleason also ruled that the plan violated the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, which requires federal agencies to determine how projects on public lands will impact those who use the lands for subsistence, according to The Audubon Society. The ruling comes as the Trump administration is proposing changes to NEPA that would drastically weaken the landmark environmental law by, among other things, limiting the length of the review process, exempting certain projects from any review and allowing federal agencies to ignore a project's climate impacts.