Fish Need Trees, Too

Aa a resident of Sitka, in southeast Alaska, I’ve worked in the local commercial fishing industry on and off for the past 17 years. This summer I’ll go out on the boat once more, in search of salmon, which have become one of the drivers of the region’s economic recovery.

This year, though, the fishing fleet in southeast Alaska will work under the shadow of an announcement by the United States Forest Service that it intends to approve the Big Thorne timber sale, which would allow the logging industry to harvest about 6,200 acres of remnant old-growth trees in Tongass National Forest, the world’s largest remaining temperate rain forest. It would be the most destructive old-growth cut in the forest in the past 20 years.

The salmon need those trees to spawn. This means we need those trees.

Read the full story:

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/22/opinion/fish-need-trees-too.html