Ethereal icebergs float in LeConte Bay in the Tongass National Forest’s Stikine-LeConte Wilderness. Photo © George Wuerthner
Jack Calvin was an adventurer and a printer by trade—but ultimately, he was an environmentalist. Upon arriving in Sitka, Alaska, in the l930s—having come from Oregon by canoe—he was instantly attracted to the beauty and grandeur of the surrounding wilderness, all part of the massive Tongass National Forest. For thirty years he explored the rugged coast and the remarkable forests of the area. Yet by the mid-l960s, he faced the loss of that wilderness due to the aggressive logging plans of the U.S. Forest Service. Taking his cue from the l964 Wilderness Act, he and some of his like-minded neighbors formulated a plan to preserve West Chichago and Yakobi islands, a particularly scenic area north of Sitka. The Calvin plan became the foundation for an alternative approach to the Tongass that profoundly influenced the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act.
The landmark law—which passed twenty-five years ago this summer—is best known for creating or expanding ten national parks, tripling the acreage of the wilderness preservation system and virtually creating the now-formidable Alaskan ecotourism industry. But the most bitterly contested features of the legislation were provisions for possible oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and, especially, for the creation of large wilderness areas in the Tongass National Forest.
Created by President Theodore Roosevelt in l902 and l907, the seventeen-million-acre Tongass is remarkable both for its size and its distinctive environment. Longer than 500 miles from end to end, it is the core of the worldœs largest temperate rain forest, embracing a thousand islands, numerous high mountains and glaciers, some of the worldœs largest trees and a wide range of unusual and threatened plants and animals. The Tongass is home to some of the most productive salmon streams in North America, a substantial portion of the worldœs largest bears and one of the worldœs greatest concentrations of bald eagles.
The trees are the key to the political and economic history of the Tongass. As early as the l920s, the Forest Service had drawn up plans for an Alaskan forest products industry based in the Tongass. Nothing happened until the post–World War II economic boom, when the regional forester negotiated a series of fifty-year contracts with pulp and paper companies. New mills at Ketchikan and Sitka soon became emblems of Forest Service activism. But so too did ever-larger swaths of cutover land in the lowland areas. Forest Service managers made no secret of their plan to convert the Tongass into a tree farm capable of driving the regionœs economy.
By the mid-l960s the devastation had become so widespread that protest groups emerged in many of the Tongass towns. Most of the early ones, like the Sitka Conservation Society that Calvin and his friends formed, were affiliates of the Alaska Conservation Society, a statewide body formed in l961. Sierra Club groups and other independent organizations joined them. Recognizing the similarity of their goals and the strength of the opposition, they formed a regional coordinating body, the Southeast Alaska Conservation Council, in l971.
For the next ten years, the Council followed Calvin’s lead and proposed to set aside wilderness zones in critical areas of the Tongass. At first, the Forest Service was receptive, but as it became evident that the environmentalists would not be satisfied with rock and ice, the relationship soured. When the Sierra Club sued in l970 to stop a new long-term contract aimed at pristine Admiralty Island, famous for its grizzly habitat, the break was complete. For the rest of the decade the Forest Service pushed its logging plans, often targeting the very areas that the group had proposed for wilderness.
A second, seemingly unrelated Alaskan environmental front opened in the late l960s with an oil industry plan to build an 800-mile oil pipeline from the newly discovered Prudhoe Bay field on the Arctic coast to Valdez on the Pacific. By 1971, environmental groups had persuaded Congress to include a provision in the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (a prelude to pipeline authorization) that temporarily set aside 80 million acres for possible national parks and wildlife refuges. Nothing happened until l977, when environmentalists mounted a concerted national campaign and leadership changes in the Congress and White House created a more favorable political climate.
One major policy issue remained: the Tongass. It had no connection to the oil pipeline, was not included in the 80 million acres, and was already a federal conservation area. But environmentalists in Alaska and elsewhere considered it to be as endangered as any other part of Alaska. Five million acres of Tongass wilderness, including one million acres of Admiralty Island, were included in the legislation.
For nearly four years the Tongass wilderness areas—about 5 percent of the lands under consideration—were the single most contested feature of the legislative campaign. They polarized towns like Ketchikan and Sitka that depended on the mills and energized wilderness opponents, but had an equally galvanizing effect on the backers of wilderness and parks. In l980 when the battle finally ended, the Alaska Conservation Act included the wilderness areas, but also a $40 million annual subsidy to enable the Forest Service to build more roads and prepare new areas for cutting. The fifty-year contracts also remained.
For the next decade it often seemed that nothing had changed. The Forest Service continued to cut trees and the environmental groups continued to do what they could to thwart or delay the logging. In desperation the Southeast Alaska Conservation Council switched tactics; instead of advocating more wilderness, it proposed to end the subsidy and the fifty-year contracts. The new approach paid immediate dividends when Congress passed the l990 Tongass Timber Reform Act, which terminated the subsidy, banned logging near salmon streams and created an additional 300,000 acres of wilderness.
Sadly, the protests, lawsuits and legislation had only a slight effect on the actual logging. Under the l971 Native Claims Act, native corporations received nearly 500,000 acres of Tongass forest. Unregulated and eager to profit from their lands, they harvested virtually every acre. By the end of the decade they had cut as much old-growth timber as the Forest Service.
The cumulative effects of these developments brought several changes in the l990s. With most of the accessible old-growth forest gone or off-limits, the Tongass mills closed, the forest products industry declined, and tourism, stimulated by the conservation act, became the foundation of the Tongass economy. A l997 Forest Service management plan proposed a genuine multiple-use approach. Yet the logging and lawsuits did not end. The insistence of the Bush administration that the roadless rule did not apply to the Tongass, the repeated efforts of the Forest Service to log the last unprotected old-growth forest in the Port Houghton area and the endless booster plans for new mills all threatened to turn back the clock.
In the long, remarkably conflicted history of the Tongass, the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act was the first successful step toward permanently preserving the forestœs primeval character. The product of more than a decade of agitation by people like Jack Calvin, it also reflected a conviction among the actœs proponents that the Tongass had to be part of the larger campaign to preserve Alaskaœs most significant wilderness areas. Without the Alaska conservation effort, other conservation strategies of the l970s would have had little long-term effect and the Tongass would be a vastly different—and less desirable—place than it is today.