June
24, 2005
The
Honorable [Full Name]
Dear
Senator [Last Name] :
On behalf of [organization
name], I urge you to vote for the Sununu/Bingaman Tongass Subsidy Amendment to
the Interior Appropriations Bill.
I’m
increasingly concerned about the waste of millions of taxpayer dollars being
spent on logging the Alaskan rainforest. In 2004, taxpayers spent $48 million
subsidizing the timber industry in the
The
remote island landscape of the Tongass makes it one of the most expensive places
to log, yet the Forest Service continues to build logging roads that go nowhere
except to publicly-owned stands of magnificent trees. Even after millions of
taxpayer dollars are unnecessarily spent, many of the timber sales in the
rainforest go unsold, and costly logging roads are left to disintegrate. The
vast network of abandoned logging roads in the Tongass has left the federal
government, or more accurately the American taxpayer, with an estimated road
maintenance backlog of nearly $100 million as of 2002.
Now
the Forest Service is moving ahead with money-losing, clearcut timber sales that
will require thousands of miles of new roads. If the Bush administration were to
stick to its proposed logging schedule, over the next decade America’s taxpayers
could expect to continue to lose tens of millions of dollars each year—a hefty price tag for
logging America’s
Rainforest.
I urge
you to end taxpayer-subsidized logging in the
I look
forward to your response.
Sincerely,