Native communities depend on the Tongass for jobs and subsistence hunting and fishing. Photo © Amy Gulick
For the past two years, an unprecedented chapter in the history of the Tongass National Forest has unfolded among previously warring stakeholders in the forest. Individuals representing interests from logging to forest protection to economic development have been meeting as members of an effort called the Tongass Futures Roundtable. Their ambitious goal is to hammer out compromises that will meet some of the economic, cultural and ecological goals that members have for the region.
The mission is optimistic, to say the least, and many are surprised that the group has hung together as long as it has.
“I thought it would be a bloodbath and a one-meeting hurrah,” says Bruce Wallace, a member representing the United Fishermen of Alaska. But by virtue of personal will and the meetings’ structure, he says, the group “has created a certain solvency I didn’t think possible at the beginning.”
“We have gone to the brink in terms of divergent views, but people on all sides have come back from the brink because they have seen the value of connection and the opportunity to network and problem-solve,” says Bruce Botelho, mayor of Juneau.
The thirty-five-member group has met in communities throughout southeastern Alaska and Washington. It includes representatives from the timber industry, environmental groups, the U.S. Forest Service, the state of Alaska, funding groups, native corporations, the fishing industry, small businesses and municipal governments.
Forrest Cole, supervisor for the Tongass National Forest, says he’s hopeful the group can make headway on issues such as mining, timber and subsistence matters so that they can be decided locally rather than by Congress.
“Ultimately, the community are the ones that are impacted [by these issues],” he says. “I think the communities deserve some answers. I think this group can give them some.”
But whether the experiment is a show of restraint and civility that will unravel when tested or a bona fide exercise in negotiated compromise remains to be seen.
The Roundtable—funded by private donor institutions—is examining a wealth of issues, including transitioning to a second-growth timber industry, protecting the quality of life in the area, sustainable economic ventures such as restoration and thinning, and addressing the pressing concerns of native communities.
But when it comes to the Tongass, the issue that draws the most attention, passion and contention is timber: how much to cut, and where to cut it. On this issue, despite the cordial relationships and energizing ideas the Roundtable has spawned, environmentalists and timber advocates remain poles apart.
“We haven’t gotten very far forward. Relationships have been formed, but our progress is in inches,” says Roundtable member Russell Heath, director of the nonprofit Southeast Alaska Conservation Council, or SEACC. “They want to cut more, we want them to cut less. The issues are intractable.”
An exchange that occurred during a recent Roundtable meeting in Seattle briefly laid bare the yawning chasm between the two sides. Two environmental groups unveiled a map of southeastern Alaska they had created showing areas of prime ecological value and community use. Dave Albers, of the Nature Conservancy, explained that the map pinpoints areas where environmentalists and the timber industry could agree that logging should be off-limits, and to “help us focus on places suitable for long-term, sustainable production.”
But where Albers saw the map as a helpful tool, timber industry representatives were dismayed. The map was drawn using the premise of an annual timber harvest of either 64 or 100 million board feet—about one-quarter of what the timber industry insists is needed to restore the industry in southeastern Alaska, which has declined significantly and now makes up just a fraction of the state’s economy.
“We need volume we consider viable instead of at the starvation level where we’re at now,” said Owen Graham, executive director of the Alaska Forest Association. “This is so far from what we need. We have lost 90 percent of our timber industry. Our goal is to restore an industry that is viable and competitive and that can provide year-round jobs.”
“We’re so far apart, we might as well go home,” added George Woodbury, a private timber contractor.
A few minutes later, Tim Bristol, with Trout Unlimited, stood and spoke directly to Graham and Woodbury. “You’ll never get a proposal that allows that much logging on the Tongass,” he said quietly. “We’re not going back to those big-cut days. Congress won’t allow it. The public won’t allow it.”
Once the undisputed king of the Tongass, the timber industry has been deposed by congressional action, increased competition and an end to subsidies for pulp companies. But ideology and tradition are dying hard on a forest where logging has sustained generations of Alaskans, including native peoples.
“Our communities are being depopulated because our youth are leaving. They feel there is no hope for them,” says Roundtable member Randy Wanamaker.
But the Roundtable is also where people involved in southeastern Alaska’s economic development are hearing the same message repeatedly: that Tongass timber is no longer competitive in the marketplace, and that there are other ways to coax jobs and revenue out of older and second-growth forests.
Until recently, Heath says, economic planners were buying into the industry’s vision of a major timber presence in the Tongass. “What we have now is people seeing that it is just not possible. The lights go off in their heads and they begin thinking differently. That is the real value of the Roundtable,” he says.