To the Editor:

Re “This Land Is Their Land” (editorial, Sept. 1):

President Trump’s directive to wipe out protections for the Tongass National Forest in Alaska threatens to drag us back to a time when the federal government was in the business of subsidizing the degradation of one of our greatest natural treasures, with timber sales that cost taxpayers more than $ 20 million a y ear.

Throughout the 1980s, the Forest Service lost anywhere f rom 9 1 to 99 cents for every dollar it spent sending 450 million board feet of old-growth timber — trees that predated the signing of the Constitution — to countries in the Pacific Rim. Each tree was sold for less than the price of a McDonald’s Big Mac.

In 1990, I wrote the Tongass Timber Reform Act to stop the Forest Service’s reckless practices and move toward a future that makes sense economically and ecologically.

President Trump’s latest boondoggle would undo hard-fought progress to preserve the world’s largest remaining temperate rainforest, at a time when the future of our planet depends on it more than ever.