The Tongass National Forest in Alaska. Photo © Amy Gulick
In this issue of Forest Magazine, we explore America’s largest national forest: the Tongass, located in southeastern Alaska. Comprising almost 17 million acres, the Tongass is an archipelago of more than 1,000 islands, as well as a strip of mainland, stretching from British Columbia to Glacier Bay, Alaska.
Yet for all its size, only 4 percent of the Tongass supports stands of old-growth forest; the balance of the land is situated above the tree line or is damp muskeg, both ill-suited to growing trees. And half of these old-growth acres have been logged since the 1950s. Nonetheless, the Tongass today stores the equivalent of 8 percent of all carbon sequestered within the forests of the forty-eight contiguous states. Although Tongass trees grow slowly—very slowly—they are protected from forest fire by more than 100 inches of rain a year. The Tongass almost never burns, which allows carbon to accumulate and to be stored for centuries.
Beginning in the 1950s, U.S. policies encouraged the settlement of southeastern Alaska, no matter the cost. The government spent $1 billion more to sell timber on the Tongass than it received in payments from the pulp mills lured to the region with the promise of tax-subsidized wood fiber.
Tongass logging peaked in the 1970s, when more than 400 million board feet were logged annually in the rainforest. But by 1997, the Tongass-dependent pulp mills were gone, victims of global competition in the dissolving pulp market and pollution-control regulations, which the mills were unwilling to meet.
No pulp mills meant little demand for Tongass timber, even with massive tax subisides. Logging levels plummeted to an average of 45 million board feet during the past six years—one-tenth the former amount. With that drop in harvest has come a proportional drop in logging and mill jobs. Combine the nation’s most expensive labor market with its most remote and inaccessible timber, and you have the least competitive timber industry imaginable. The Tongass timber industry is all but finished as anything but a local, boutique supplier of specialty wood products and tonewood for guitar makers.
Even as the Tongass timber industry was drying up, with only 200 jobs now linked to Tongass logging, the forest’s recreation and tourism industry was—and is—booming, employing almost 6,000 workers. Combine those with the 4,000 jobs linked to southeastern Alaska’s fishing industry, which depends upon forests, not clear-cuts, and the economic future of the Tongass is unambiguously green.
It is only a matter of time before the United States is compelled to make binding global climate change commitments. A new treaty, which may come as soon as 2009, will likely allow developed countries to take credit for storing carbon in forests. The Tongass is the low-hanging fruit of carbon storage, with vast reserves of carbon already sequestered and the potential for storing even more carbon as past clear-cuts regenerate and grow. The fate of the Tongass will affect your life, whether you live in New Jersey or California. We must save its forests now.