08/22/2026
This is not just a call to Alaskans. This is for all Americans. We need to pay attention.
This isn’t just about saving pretty trees.
Untamed has always been about living connected to the world around us and not just here in Alaska, but everywhere. Our lands and waters support our food, our jobs, our communities, our traditions, and even the air we breathe.
Protecting them isn’t about protecting a view. It’s about protecting our way of life and recognizing that what happens to one part of this country can impact all of us.
The Tongass is part of the largest intact temperate rainforest left on Earth.
And “intact” is the important word here.
An intact rainforest isn’t just a bunch of trees that haven’t been cut down yet. It’s an entire living system that is still connected and functioning the way it has for thousands of years.
The trees, soil, wetlands, moss, streams, fallen logs, plants, fungi, fish and wildlife all work together.
Trees and roots hold soil in place. Wetlands and forest floors absorb enormous amounts of water. The forest filters that water as it moves through the ground and into streams and rivers. Tree cover keeps those streams cool. Salmon use them to reproduce. Wildlife depends on the salmon. Salmon returning from the ocean actually carry nutrients back into the forest.
Pull enough pieces out and eventually the system doesn’t work the same way anymore.
That’s why this is about much more than trees.
The federal government is proposing to remove the Roadless Rule, which currently protects millions of acres of national forest from most new road construction and certain development.
For Alaska, that includes millions of acres of the Tongass.
And what happens there reaches far beyond Southeast Alaska.
FOOD + JOBS
The waters of the Tongass produce roughly 75% of Southeast Alaska’s commercial salmon catch.
That’s food moving throughout the United States.
It’s also commercial fishing, sport fishing, charter businesses, tourism, seafood processing, transportation, restaurants, grocery stores and thousands of paychecks.
You don’t have to pick a side in every fight over Alaska’s fisheries to understand one basic thing:
Fish need healthy places to reproduce.
Protecting the habitat that produces them is not an argument about who gets to catch the fish.
It’s protecting the thing that makes having fish possible in the first place.
WATER
An intact rainforest works a little like a gigantic sponge and filtration system.
Rain and snow don’t simply hit bare ground and rush downhill.
Trees slow the water. Moss, wetlands and deep forest soils absorb it. Roots stabilize hillsides and streambanks. Water moves through that system before reaching streams, rivers and the ocean.
That matters for clean water, salmon habitat, erosion and flooding.
Roads change how water moves across the landscape. They compact soil, cross streams and alter drainage. Logging removes vegetation and exposes soil. Sediment that washes downstream doesn’t care about politics.
It just goes downstream.
AND THEN THERE’S CARBON.
You’ve probably heard forests like the Tongass called a “carbon sink.”
That sounds much more complicated than it is.
Trees naturally pull carbon dioxide from the air as they grow. They use the carbon to build wood, roots and leaves.
That carbon doesn’t disappear.
It gets stored.
Some stays in enormous old trees. Some ends up in roots, fallen wood and the forest floor. A tremendous amount is stored in the soil.
Think of an old rainforest like a massive carbon savings account that nature has been depositing into for hundreds — sometimes thousands — of years.
The Tongass holds an extraordinary amount of it.
Why should someone in Ohio, Texas or Florida care?
Because the atmosphere isn’t divided by state lines.
Carbon dioxide helps trap heat in Earth’s atmosphere. Keeping enormous existing stores of carbon locked in forests and soil affects the same atmosphere every American lives under.
You don’t have to belong to a political party to understand chemistry.
AND THIS LAND ALREADY HAS ECONOMIC VALUE.
A standing forest isn’t economically worthless just because nobody has turned the trees into lumber.
It produces fish.
It supports tourism.
It supports hunting and recreation.
It protects water.
It stores carbon.
It provides wildlife habitat.
It supports businesses and jobs.
It does all of those things at the same time.
That doesn’t mean America should never log another tree.
We use lumber. We build homes. Timber provides jobs. Responsible resource development has a place in Alaska and across this country.
But there is an enormous difference between harvesting a renewable resource and breaking apart one of the last intact ecosystems of its kind on Earth.
And roads matter because roads are often the beginning, not the end.
Once a road enters previously roadless country, access changes permanently. More development becomes possible. More habitat becomes fragmented. And the forest is no longer intact in the way it was before.
We can grow another tree.
We cannot manufacture another thousand-year-old ecosystem.
This is public land.
Alaskans: this is in our backyard.
Americans everywhere else: this belongs to you, too.
And whether you care about salmon, clean water, wildlife, hunting, fishing, jobs, food, the economy, public land or simply leaving something extraordinary for people who haven’t been born yet, you have a reason to care about what happens here.
The public comment period is open now.
Read the proposal.
Ask questions.
Submit a comment.
Contact your representatives.
And please share this with somebody who has no idea this is happening.
Because before we decide what we’re willing to give up, we should at least understand what we have.
Some things are worth leaving wild.
Public comment page: http://Regulations.gov
Support conservation efforts: https://seacc.org/donate/
The chainsaws are coming for the last untouched forests in America. On Tuesday the Trump administration moved to shred the Roadless Rule, the 25-year-old line standing between the saws and roughly 45 million acres of national forest that has never been cut, drilled, or paved.
Sit with what "untouched" means.
Old growth that was standing before this country had a name. The Tongass in Alaska, the largest intact temperate rainforest left on Earth, and the single greatest carbon sanctuary in our entire national forest system. Headwaters that feed clean drinking water to tens of millions of Americans and protect around 81,000 miles of rivers.
Ground no bulldozer has ever scarred.
They want to sell it.
The official story is fire safety. It collapses the second you check it. Wildfires are up to four times more likely to ignite near roads, because roads bring people, and people bring sparks. You do not save a forest from burning by carving highways into its heart.
So who actually wins?
Follow the timber. You already own these trees. Taxpayers have sunk more than $5 billion into logging roads since 1975, and the Forest Service has a long habit of handing publicly owned timber to logging companies for next to nothing while we foot the bill for their access.
This is not forest management. It is a clearance sale of the commons.
Some things are not supposed to carry a price tag.
A grove of thousand-year-old trees is not inventory. These are the closest thing this country has to sacred ground, and the desecration is permanent. Once the road goes in and the saws start, no future election, no reversal, no apology brings that forest back. It is gone.
And they know it. So they are rushing. The public comment window has been squeezed down to a matter of weeks, because they are betting you will not look up in time.
Look up.
Then make noise. Comment on the rule. Call your reps. Share this before the trees are down.
The people trying to liquidate the last wild places in America are counting on one thing above all else: that we will be too distracted to notice until it is already too late.
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