The decline of logging in Southeast Alaska’s Tongass National Forest is reverberating all the way to Astoria, a neighborhood in Queens, New York City, where Steinway & Sons builds pianos in one of the city’s oldest operating factories.

Steinway credits slow-growing Sitka spruce from the islands of Southeast Alaska with giving its iconic pianos their sonorous, six-figure sound. The pianos’ ribs, braces, soundboards and white keys are all made from Sitka spruce.

That supply is now in jeopardy. Steinway’s lone source of Sitka spruce, Viking Lumber, says it is running out of wood because of a lack of logging in the Tongass, which covers most of Southeast.

Viking’s facility in Klawock, on Prince of Wales Island, is the Alaska Panhandle’s last big sawmill and will close without Tongass timber sales, said Kirk Dahlstrom, one of Viking’s owners.

A last-minute deal with Alaska’s state government to cut state-owned timber, along with previous logging contracts that are winding down this month, will provide enough wood to run the mill through winter, when the weather prohibits work in the forest, he said. Dahlstrom said he isn’t sure how the mill will obtain wood next year.

Closure would crush the economy of the remote island, where the biggest town, Craig, has about 1,000 residents. The sawmill employs about 45 people year-round, and truck drivers, barge pilots, loggers and others would lose work as well.

“It’s serious,” Dahlstrom said.

President Donald Trump has called for increased timber harvests from federal forests as part of his broader push to boost the country’s capacity to produce raw materials. He is also contemplating tariffs on imported lumber in the name of national security.

The Agriculture Department has begun the process of rescinding its Roadless Rule, which blocks road building or reconstruction on roughly 59 million federal acres and has impeded logging. Meanwhile, regional U.S. Forest Service supervisors have been told to develop five-year plans to contribute to a 25% increase in the overall timber harvest on federal land.

Neither initiative will solve Viking’s immediate problem.

Given how little wood has been harvested from the Tongass in recent years, a 25% increase there would barely register at Viking’s mill, Dahlstrom said.

“What’s that, a week of wood?” he said. “It’s like a pittance.”

Viking has bought a few small federal timber sales in recent years but hasn’t been offered a sizable tract since 2016, Dahlstrom said. That was the year a forest management plan was adopted for the Tongass that projected an annual harvest several times as large as it has been.

In March, Viking, another logging company and the Alaska Forest Association sued the Forest Service, Agriculture Department and Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, claiming that the government failed to live up to its end of the 2016 forest plan and has unlawfully restricted logging of old-growth trees.

Wood from old-growth forests is often the most sought after, yet ancient trees are also typically the foundations of pristine and finely tuned ecosystems.

In court filings, government lawyers contend that the 2016 plan merely maps out goals and doesn’t bind the Forest Service to offer specific quantities or types of timber for sale. Tribal groups, fishing interests and environmental groups have intervened in the case in opposition to large-scale logging of old-growth forests.

Although federal agencies and officials are the defendants in the case, they have been expressing support for Viking outside of court.

In a social-media post, Secretary Rollins wrote, “WE ARE ON IT. The people of Alaska and the timber industry deserve so much better than the political whiplash they have endured for decades.”

Dahlstrom started out as a sawyer in Washington state in 1978, when he and his brother built a sawmill to cut timber from the Olympic National Forest into doors, window frames and other building products. In the early 1990s, environmentalists who were worried about the era’s aggressive logging of old-growth forests took what was then a novel approach and used the Endangered Species Act to sue on behalf of the threatened northern spotted owl. Logging restrictions ensued, and the volume of wood harvested from national forests plummeted.

Dahlstrom’s business had a contract to supply hemlock to a garage-door maker, so he and his partners bought a bankrupt sawmill on Prince of Wales Island and expanded their operation to Alaska, where there were plenty of old hemlock trees and no northern spotted owls.

There, Viking began cutting Sitka spruce, a strong yet lightweight wood that was used to make early airplanes and became one of the world’s most important commodities during World War I.

Japanese buyers, who supplied piano makers across the Pacific Ocean, were Viking’s first spruce customers. Eventually Viking began selling to Steinway, too.

As other Alaskan mills closed, Viking became the only seller to Steinway as well as a supplier to guitar makers, aviation firms and the military, which uses spruce for missile nose cones.

Steinway’s spruce is barged to Washington for further processing and then trucked to New York, where the company has been making pianos since 1853. It is by far the most expensive type of wood that goes into Steinway pianos, which also feature hard rock maple, poplar and mahogany, said Kyle Walters, the company’s director of manufacturing.

Steinway has plenty of spruce on hand to maintain its pace of making about 1,000 pianos a year in its New York factory, said Chief Executive Ben Steiner. Stacks of it are airing out in the lot, drying in kilns and at work stations throughout the factory’s four floors. Yet the company is alarmed enough that it has written Alaska elected officials to advocate for Viking.

Sitka spruce’s range extends down the Pacific Coast into Northern California. But the trees that Steinway needs — especially for the panels that sit beneath piano strings and amplify the sound—are in Alaska, where the brief growing season results in a tighter grain than the spruce in the temperate rainforests of Washington and Oregon, Steiner said.

“That’s what gives it its resonance,” Steiner said. “We use the top 1% of the top 1% of spruce.”