Over the years, I’ve walked many visitors into the Tongass national forest in Alaska, and watched the city tinsel drop from their eyes. They often sit quietly and look around, and for the first time in a long time breathe from the bottom of their lungs.

I live here, I tell them.

I live here, in this land made of water, where green is not just a color, it’s a texture. Where salmon run and bears roam, and whales swim into my dreams. Where my neighbors and I build our homes from wood selectively cut and locally milled. Where we pick berries and hunt deer, and remember the slaughter, back in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, when US taxpayers heavily subsidized large-scale clearcut logging.

The trees often became pulp, which in turn became rayon and cellophane to make disposable diapers and other throwaway consumer products. Whole logs were even shipped to China and Japan.

For all this, our senator William Proxmire – bless his courageous heart – gave the US Forest Service (USFS) the “Golden Fleece Award” to draw attention to such waste.

This massacre might now return, as the secretary of agriculture, Sonny Perdue, wants to put Alaska’s Tongass national forest back to work as a “healthy” forest.

“Healthy forests produce health in many ways,” Perdue said, “for humans, for wildlife, for fishing, for water quality and for beauty. Actually, we see this in many places. This is Senator Murkowski’s desire as well.” That would be the same Lisa Murkowski, who pushed for oil drilling in the Arctic national wildlife refuge.

This would create jobs, yes. But not every job makes the world a better place

Don’t be fooled. In short, Perdue and Murkowski want to exempt Alaska from the 2001 USFS “roadless rule” that prohibits road building on 44.8m acres in 37 states. They want to expand clearcut logging (and road building) in America’s premier temperate rainforest, one of the rarest biomes in the world.

This would create jobs, yes. A few. But in today’s world not every job is a smart job. Not every job makes the world a better place.

Back in 1999, more than 1.6 million people commented on the USFS roadless rule, with 95% supporting strong roadless protection to keep forests pristine, waters clean.

If Perdue understood ecology, climate science and environmental economics, he’d see the Tongass as already healthy, and working for us. Primal old-growth trees – the trees Perdue wants to cut down – breathe in vast amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2, a greenhouse gas), sequester it, and exhale life-giving oxygen. In today’s warming world, it’s the best deal going.

‘I live here, in this land made of water, where green is not just a color, it’s a texture.’ Photograph: John Schoen/Anchorage/PA

Together with phytoplankton in the oceans, primal forests are the lungs of the earth, a valuable safety valve against runaway climate change, with all its droughts, fires and floods, including the biggest flood of all: our rising, acidifying seas (where atmospheric CO2 is absorbed in the oceans to become carbonic acid).

But many Republicans regard this environmental talk as liberal nonsense. Let’s put these forests back to work, they say. Is this who we are? For a forest to be healthy, we must cut it down? We must lay bare entire valleys and mountainsides?

Around the world, nature does an estimated $340bn of work for humans, for free, each day. Trees respiring, salmon returning, bees pollinating. Real-world economists call these “ecosystem services” (or “natural capital”), and take them seriously. It’s not a matter of the environment versus the economy. The environment is the economy. Nature underwrites the underwriters.

“What is the use of a house,” Thoreau reminds us, “if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on?”

The Tongass national forest is already working for us. Let it be.