Southeastern Alaska encompasses 33,000 miles of shoreline. Shown here are the Percy Islands, Tongass National Forest. Photo © Amy Gulick
A century ago, and fifty years before Alaska was made a state, President Teddy Roosevelt set aside the massive swath of forest, glacier and rock that became the 16.8-million-acre Tongass National Forest. Rumor has it he was inspired by fellow adventurer John Muir, who first explored the Alexander Archipelago in 1879 and later wrote ecstatically of southeastern Alaska’s stunning geographic wonders.
“In these coast landscapes there is such indefinite, on-leading expansiveness, such a multitude of features without apparent redundance, their lines graduating delicately into one another in endless succession, while the whole is so fine, so tender, so ethereal, that all pen-work seems hopelessly unavailing,” Muir wrote in his 1915 book Travels in Alaska. “Tracing shining ways through fiord and sound, past forests and waterfalls, islands and mountains and far azure headlands, it seems as if surely we must at length reach the very paradise of the poets, the abode of the blessed.”
Today, the Tongass still generates rapture. It is home to the last remnant of an old-growth temperate rain forest that once stretched to northern California, and the remnant represents a third of what’s left of that ecosystem worldwide. Its waters yield great harvests of fish and crab. Salmon remain the lifeblood of the region, supporting a food chain that includes eagles, bears, Sitka black-tailed deer, wolves and a host of insects and organic matter. Jagged mountains, glaciers and inland waterways provide scenic wonders to awestruck tourists.
But decades of intensive logging have drastically altered much of the landscape Muir described so eloquently. Coastal forests have been logged to stumps, as has much of Prince of Wales Island. Wildlife has also been impacted. Recent clear-cuts don’t provide protection from snow that covers forage needed by deer and other species. Older second-growth forests develop closed canopies that don’t allow sunlight to filter through, creating an ecological desert on the forest floor and meager winter resources for deer and moose.
The Tongass’s fish and trees have helped feed and clothe the area’s 75,000 residents for decades. But where logging is concerned, the support has come at a price. In the past fifteen years, thanks to the work of southeastern Alaska’s dogged environmental community, steps have been taken to protect the Tongass. The Clinton administration cancelled contracts that allowed two pulp mills to obtain logs “at the price of a cheeseburger,” as environmental writer Tim Egan put it. The mills are now closed, timber harvests are at an all-time low and the timber industry has been reduced to a shadow of its former self.
But the issues plaguing the Tongass are far from settled. Native corporations, who by law still have access to 85,000 acres on the Tongass and are notorious for unsustainable logging practices, have a bill before Congress asking to log outside their designated area. The timber industry wants to ramp up its presence, and rural communities are desperate for jobs. Environmentalists are determined to save roadless—and some roaded—areas from the chainsaw. Native communities that depend on subsistence hunting and fishing fear their livelihood is at risk. The U.S. Forest Service’s revised plan for the Tongass, which came out in late January, calls for phased-in logging and protects some biologically sensitive areas. But its allowable logging levels are still higher than what environmentalists want and less than what the timber industry says it needs.
This special section on the Tongass looks at these issues and the measures being taken to find solutions. Much like the Tongass itself, it’s tough terrain to navigate, with patches of soggy muskeg, steep inclines threaded with prickly devil’s club and dense, dark second-growth forests. The hope is that those who love and value the Tongass make it to one of the high, icy peaks, where the elevation provides clarity and vision.