Ordinarily, the White House will announce controversial news late on Friday so as to avoid negative media attention. Using the same logic, however, Christmas Eve is even better than a Friday.
The administration announced yesterday that it would open up 300,000 acres of Alaska’s Tongass National Forest for logging and other development. The timing of the announcement, which will probably go largely unnoticed because of the holiday, would have likely sparked a major controversy were it unveiled, say, two weeks ago.
Tongass is the nation’s largest national forest and one of our last old-growth forests. Business interests have targeted it for many years now, but the Clinton administration had protected the area from development. The Bush administration will now reverse those protections.
Amy Mall of the Natural Resources Defense Council, told the Washington Post the administration’s new policy would open to development “the most valuable habitat from one of our most important forests and one of the most ancient forests worldwide.”