Tongass Wildlife Biologist Glen Ith Dies at 48

Glen Ith photo courtesy Alice Tallmadge

On March 3, Glen Ith passed away unexpectedly of Sudden Cardiac Death, an abrupt loss of heart function often associated with undiagnosed coronary artery disease. Glen, 48, is survived by his wife Marketa, daughter Izabelle, 9, his mother, Helma and other family members.

Glen began his Forest Service career on the Tongass National Forest in the mid 1980s and he was promoted to wildlife biologist on the Petersburg District in 2001. A hunter, fisherman, craftsman and builder, he was also president of the board of the Petersburg Childhood Education Center in Alaska.

Glen was also a whistleblower. In 2005, Glen learned of a logging road being constructed in an area of the Tongass National Forest where no timber sale had yet been approved. Glen appealed to the agency but his concerns fell on deaf ears. He contacted Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics in August of 2005 and sent photographs of the road work, together with an email message suggesting that because the road reconstruction, the timber harvest for the log stringer bridges and the decision to harvest were all connected actions, that something was amiss in the U.S. Forest Service’s process.

It turned out Glen had uncovered a pattern of illegal road building on the Tongass which, together with FSEEE, he challenged in federal district court. In December, 2006, Judge Sedgwick agreed with Glen, saying in words almost identical to Glen’s, that “The Forest Service concedes that it has violated NEPA, specifically that the use of a categorical exclusion for the road contracts at issue was improper because the road reconstruction and the planned timber sale projects constitute connected actions that should be considered in the NEPA documents for the timber sale projects.”

Glen also appealed the Scott Peak timber sale—slated to log 347 acres of temperate old-growth rainforest on Kupreanof Island—because he believed cumulative impacts from nearby logging hadn’t been adequately studied. Again, his concerns were upheld and the timber sale remanded for further analysis. Glen’s subsequent challenge against the re-issued Scott Peak sale, on the grounds that it failed to consider environmental analysis critical of the logging, was pending in federal district court at the time of his death.

In the months prior to Glen’s passing, he was reassigned to a different office and then placed on administrative leave pending his supervisor’s request that he be terminated. Glen protested his reassignment and administrative leave to the Office of Special Counsel, which agreed there was sufficient evidence of retaliation to launch an investigation. With Glen’s death, the Special Counsel closed its investigation.

On a personal note, it was my great privilege to advocate on Glen’s behalf. He had an unshakable belief that our system of government would work. Although the path might be difficult and demand perseverance, he believed that the truth would prevail. Glen had the character, intelligence, wisdom, moral fiber and family support necessary to vindicate the truth. He won every fight—only his heart muscle denied him the chance to clear his name of the Forest Service’s baseless accusations. I have no doubt he would have prevailed. —Andy Stahl

The following was written by Forest Magazine’s Associate Editor following Glen’s death. Alice recently spent time with Glen at his Petersburg home while doing research for the current issue.

Glen was a husband, dad and son, a builder, a wanderer and a reader. Glen loved to hunt and fish and his bookshelves were crammed with all sorts of nature-related books. One of his favorite writers was Portland-based Katherine Dunn, a former Willamette Week columnist who nurtures a love of boxing and authored the book Geek Love.

Each of the three mornings I was there he made me a breakfast of oatmeal, tea and toast and then, armed with cookies and chocolate, we climbed in his old, heavy-duty vehicle to go poke around the Tongass, which I had never visited before. The thermometer never went above fifteen degrees but he didn’t seem to notice. He had an incredible mind for detail, and he was focused on getting me to understand how the interlocking systems on the Tongass worked. He explained why second-growth forests and clear-cuts were bad for Sitka deer and other wildlife, why the Forest Service was off-base in how it was measuring deer populations and reams of other policy minutiae.

Glen had a penchant for doing things right, regardless of how long it took, and it galled him to see wasteful or inappropriate actions on the forest. He remembered every timber sale he ever appealed—there were several—and why. He took me to the Overlook site where we saw dozens of big yellow-cedar logs piled neatly on the side of the road. He told me the Forest Service had intended to use them to build stringer bridges along the illegal logging road, but then the project stalled. They put the 170 logs up for bid but there were no takers. Glen recently discovered a friend of his had bought the whole lot for $1700—or $10 per tree.

On our last full day, Glen took me to the summer cabin he’d been building for the past decade on land he won in a state lottery. It’s situated above a bay about a fifteen-minute drive, plus another half-hour trek, from his home. To get to the cabin we had to walk several hundred feet downhill on narrow wooden walkways that he put in because the swampy muskeg would otherwise make access almost impossible. Like Glen, the cabin is sturdy but a little rough around the edges and not quite finished. He had done all the work on the cabin himself—cleared a space, felled the trees for the outer walls and beams from his property and milled them right there because they would have been much too big to haul back up to the road.

We made our way further down the slope along a faint trail and passed a shack where he lived for several months while he was clearing his land and doing preliminary work on his cabin. It was a tiny thing with no heat and no electricity and he said that the months he spent there were some of the best of his life. When we got to the bay, humpbacked whales were calling to each other with their eerie, plaintive songs, and we could see them breaching in the distance. The sun was brilliant but it was freezing and my hands ached horribly just from trying to take photos. The bitter cold reminded Glen of another bright winter day, years ago, when he flipped his kayak while pulling into that same shore. He somehow made it out of the water and up to his shack where he was able to take off his clothes and get in his sleeping bag. He was shaking so hard, he said, he could barely maneuver.

We climbed back up the path and through the frozen muskeg to the truck, whale song and wind at our back. Driving deeper and higher into the forest, Glen spotted a moose in the distance. We drove closer and it bounded into the brush. I thought we had lost it, but I forgot that Glen had keen hunter’s eyes. He drove slowly to the spot where he had last seen the moose and we peered into the trees. Sure enough, we spotted a young moose and its much larger mom, looking warily back at us.

We parked the truck and trudged up through the snow. Angular, layered and powder-light, it didn’t look like any snow I’d seen before. We were in an older clear-cut where, years ago, thanks to the urging of another wildlife biologist, the Forest Service had for the first time on the district left some standing trees as habitat for cavity-nesting birds. Glen was tickled to see several recent nesting holes in some of the trees that had been left. It was almost a personal triumph for him that, given a place to nest, the birds had found a home.

It was so cold while I was on the Tongass that all the streams looked like they had been stopped and flash-frozen in mid-flow. You could imagine the motion, but you couldn’t see it. Waterfalls had turned into sculptures of ice. The ripples in the streams were solid in their fragility. Then, the stilled waters struck me as oddly beautiful. Now I think they are a fitting metaphor for Glen, his life stopped short in mid-flow, and now as much a part of nature as the deer and fish and trees he felt so akin to. —Alice Tallmadge