"What had looked like another cloud bank sailing in high from the west turned out to be the ice fields of the Coast Range. Mountain bluebirds wafted along the river. Gulls wheeled and screamed over the first slug of spawning candlefish. Water ouzels on rocks and logs bobbed, dipped, then marched into and under the current. Ravens harassed bald eagles. A snowy owl patrolled the meadow at high noon. Upstream there were beavers, river otters, a freshly undenned black bear, and, though we didn't see them, brown bears, moose, Sitka black-tailed deer, mountain goats, and wolverines. The river's sandy banks were littered with the spines, jaws, and gill plates of last year's spawned-out salmon -- all five species. In the clear water, salmon-size steelhead trout, minutes out of the Pacific, surged from our shadows or eased through deadfalls."
That is how Ted Williams chronicled his first impression of the Tongass in the September/October 2002 issue of Mother Jones. The largest federal forest and the biggest roadless area in the US, the 17-million-acre Tongass is also the heart of the planet's largest and oldest temperate rainforest. For much of the past century, the Tongass was protected by its isolation. More recently, more than half of it has been protected by the Clinton-era roadless rule, under which road-building and commercial logging were banned.
The Bush administration wants to change all that. Having chipped away at the Roadless Rules since the very first month of his administration, the president has recently proposed exempting the Tongass and Chugach forests from the regulation. Under Bush's plan, 10 million acres of the Tongass could be opened to logging.
"They're getting rid of the Roadless Rule, and then they'll just be able to do whatever they want here in the Tongass," says the Southeast Alaska Conservation Council's (SEACC) Conservation Director Buck Lindekugel. Lindekugel explains that logging doesn't only threaten the pristine wilderness. In addition to recreational and commercial uses, residents of the rural communities surrounding the Tongass rely on the forest for subsistence.
"People live up here because they can continue lifestyles that rely on and utilize the natural resources here in a sustainable manner. And unfortunately, logging doesn't. They may say they're cutting at a sustainable rate but what they're doing is they're turning areas that are relatively small portion of the forest that is the biological heart of the forest -- the watersheds with the salmon streams and best wildlife habitats -- they're turning those into clear cuts. And once you have a clear cut, you lose the habitat values."
According to SEACC, 70 percent of the Tongass' most valuable old growth trees have already been cut -- and while it was at one time a lucrative economy, Lindekugel argues that the Forest Service no longer makes enough from timber fees to warrant more cutting. The only available numbers of visitors to the park are those who come through on cruises -- 720, 000 last year -- but Lindekugel estimates at least a million people come through the forest every year. He argues that the local and federal government should focus on maintaining the current roads, protecting the salmon population, and thinning the already clear-cut areas.
"These trees are more valuable standing than they are stacked up in some sawmills' sort yard, where they can't find a buyer to take them. That's the reality. The value of these trees providing habitat, and opportunities for tourism and recreation, is much greater over the long term than you get from cutting them down."
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