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Holding the phone in one hand and grazing late season hornets with the other, Senator Dan Sullivan nods and smiles while Trump promises to fill a Republican wish list that environmentalists have been fighting for generations.
It mentions oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge all the way north and the construction of a road crossing the Izembek National Wildlife Sanctuary to the south. "King Cove Road! Yessir!" Sullivan said while Senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi nods vigorously.
Enter Governor Mike Dunleavy, who has bonded with Trump during refueling stops in Air Force One, often bringing a list of rules and restrictions that he wants to cancel. With oil prices dropping, Alaska's budget is in the red and Dunleavy is looking for another industry to help it.
"It's a great guy," says Trump about Dunleavy through the speaker. "And he's doing something with your journaling and all your other things, we're working on it together and it's moving forward."
While nature lovers and Earth scientists have been fighting alaskan politicians for years against ANWR and King Cove Road, Trump's mention of "logging" reopens a different front in an old war because everyone knows that he is talking about Tongass, jewel of the national forest system. .
Spread over the islands and fjords of the panhandle of Alaska, Tongass is about the size of West Virginia, overflowing with tall spruce, cedar and hemlocks, trees twice as old than America itself. It traps and retains so much carbon that it is called "American America".
The pristine nature is home to an abundance of salmon, bears, wolves, eagles and whales that live alongside about 70,000 people.
And in the small town of Tenakee Springs, the reaction is "shocked and dismayed".
"After all the work we have done to keep this area without roads and keep it as pristine as possible," said fishing captain Tuck Harry, shaking his head.
"And you would call yourself" liberal "? I ask him.
He's laughing. "No, not at all, not at all an eye-catching liberal in the trees," he says, looking through a mirrored Tenakee Inlet on the hillside, once marked by clearcuts.
He has been here since 1960, at a time when the Forest Service was treating Alaska more as a forest yard than as a sanctuary. In order to create jobs in the "last frontier", millennia old forests have been reduced to pulp.
But after years of legal battles and negotiations, a Clinton-era "roadless rule" seemed to solve the problem, protecting Tongass from any new interests in logging or mining.
"As a governor, I've raised this issue with the Trump administration on many occasions – stressing every time the need to restore Tongass's multiple use mandate to allow for such activities. that tourism, lumber, mining, hydroelectricity and more, "reads a statement to CNN from Dunleavy.
But Art Bloom, the former mayor of Tenakee Springs, says it's impossible to have all of these industries in Tongass at the same time. Alaska has to choose.
"People aboard cruise ships do not want to watch the bare slopes," he said. "They come here because of what is still there.They would not come here if it was a lot of stumps."
Bloom, a fish biologist who came to Alaska in the 1970s and is now a commercial salmon fisherman, explains the importance of land for the sea. While crossing the ground of the spongy forest, he says that the old forest unspoiled is the only reason why Alaska has such a flourishing fishery.
"Along the streams, trees keep the temperature of the water cool, so salmon depends on trees to reproduce.Trees depend on salmon to bring nutrients from the ocean," he says. . "You could never have that once you cut it, it's going to come back as an even-aged stand that has to be managed and is a plantation and not a forest, and that will not support the wildlife that it supports."
Her daughter Lindsay Bloom, herself a fishing captain and now a strategist for the Salmon State rights group, has her sights set on the future and what she wants for her young children.
"First, health and well-being, clean air, clean water and food," she says. "And second, when I think of their future jobs, they can do it and regenerate themselves. We're really proud to be fishermen, you know, because it's refreshing and multigenerational. And if we manage it properly, we can do it forever. But she fears that it is no longer in danger.
Lumberjack Gordon Chew acknowledges: "No one in this city would have to gain a mile more road here or there than me.
"One kilometer of road built in an area that has never been harvested would be almost a life of selective logging," he says.
Chew runs a flour milling business with his son. While he believes that old trees can be harvested sustainably one tree at a time, he is terrified of returning to the clearing of the past.
"When you're building a road, you do not know what's going to happen, and the reason you're building a road that costs a million dollars a mile is to extract huge resources … a lot against that," says -he.
"As the resource-based state and the highest unemployment rate in the country, we continue to work with our federal partners to find solutions that support growth and economic prospects," said the governor in his report. declaration.
But the fishing guide Tuck Harry pushes him to take a broader view.
"I have a lot, a lot of friends in logging, but even many of them are now on the side of environmental protection," he says with a serious roar.
"When I'm going to talk to some of my oldest 35-year-old friends, they can see what happened.They can see the degradation of the streams there." That's not what we want that it happen here, "he says.
"So, for the governor and the president, here's what I say: do not do this to us."
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