The Environmental Legend and the Real Tongass

There's such a difference between knowing something in your head and experiencing it directly with your whole self.

I've known about the Tongass National Forest for years. To anyone who follows environmental news, it's legendary. America's last temperate rainforest. Eagles and wolves and grizzlies. Massive clearcuts, crooked deals with pulp companies. The federal forest that loses more taxpayer money than any other.

Knowing all that, seeing pictures of the intact forest and the cruel clearcuts, made me a crusader for the Tongass. Then this summer I went to southeast Alaska and began to know what I was talking about.

The Tongass pretty much IS southeast Alaska, that long chain of coast and islands that reaches nearly halfway down the Canadian province of British Columbia toward Washington state. There is private land there, especially around the few towns -- Sitka, Haines, Skagway, Ketchikan. Most towns, including Juneau, the state capital, can only be reached by boat or plane. There are also native reservations and Tlingit towns -- Angoon, Hoonah, Kake. But most of southeast Alaska belongs to you and me and the other 270 million of us, in the form of Glacier Bay National Park, Admiralty and Misty Fjords National Monuments, and the Tongass National Forest.

From a boat threading the inland channels the land looks both dramatic and monotonous. Steep slopes plunge down into dark water. Gray sky and dripping mist (on average 100 inches of precipitation a year). Trees, trees, trees, trees. Only two main kinds of trees, Sitka spruce and western hemlock, send tall trunks straight up to the clouds. You can understand why the Tlingits developed totem poles as an art form. Those poles look exactly right set against those trees.

The only excitement, from a boat in the middle of a channel, comes from feeding, frolicking humpback whales. If you're in a boat that stops for whales, you can drift quietly, hear them grunt and sing and blow all around you, watch them leap, tail flukes sinking gracefully back down below the surface. When they find a surface school of fish, you can look right down their gullets as they open their jaws and scoop along like huge baskets, panicked silvery fish leaping out of their way.

There are also boats chasing those fish. This is a fishing economy more than it ever has been or will be a logging economy. Salmon and crab and halibut supply hundreds of commercial fishing operations and subsistence for most of the full-time residents, human and otherwise.

The "otherwise" residents become obvious if you get into a small boat that can go near shore. Eagles everywhere. Gulls, puffins, seals, sea lions, and, at low tide, black bears coming down to the beach to scarf up mussels. These and other creatures feed on the incredible abundance of marine life and deposit the nutrients back up on land, where they nourish the forest.

The champions of the uphill nutrient pump are the salmon. Six kinds of salmon surge up the clear streams of the Tongass at six different times of year to spawn and die and fatten bears and eagles and Tlingits. There used to be salmon runs like that all along the east coast where I live, but I had never seen one till I went to the Tongass. It brought tears to my eyes, a stream so full of fish I could hardly see the water, an intense, purposeful backward-flowing fish-river, lifting nutrients from the sea high up onto the land to renew the cycle of life.

Southeast Alaska is one of the few places where we haven't yet extinguished that salmon-flow by clearcutting forests and paving land and damming and polluting rivers. But the Forest Service, which manages this treasure for you and me, has already permitted over half a million acres of clearcuts, with 670,000 more acres earmarked for the loggers.

Inside the Tongass forest the apparent sameness disappears. You walk along streams, struggle up steep slopes, run into open bogs. There are blueberries, salmonberries, nangoonberries, watermelonberries, bog orchids, coralroot orchids, devil's club, skunk cabbage. Above all there is moss.

Walking in the Tongass is like walking on deep sponge. Moss hangs in festoons from tree branches and pads the sides of standing trunks. Fallen trees become moss gardens, out of which sprout neat lines of new seedling trees. I dutifully looked up in awe at the soaring old-growth trunks, but then I spent the rest of the time looking down at the lush recycling system on the forest floor. I will leave to your imagination -- no, better, go see it yourself -- what happens to this intricate system and to the deer and bears and blueberries and soil when you clearcut this forest on steep slopes with 100 inches of rain per year.

For decades we taxpayers subsidized the cutting of the Tongass at a rate of about $40 million a year. Two huge pulp companies, one owned by Louisiana-Pacific Corporation and one by Japanese investors, have had sweetheart deals giving them Tongass trees for roughly ten percent of their market value.

The good news is that both those pulp mills are now shut down. There is an opportunity to manage the Tongass right, doing careful selective cuts that allow all species to prosper whilestill feeding dozens of sawmills and small wood-products companies. The bad news is that Alaska's Congressional delegation, Senators Frank Murkowski and Ted Stevens and Representative Don Young, constantly shove through legislation ordering the Forest Service to get out larger cuts in the Tongass.

I could go on about the glaciers, the thousand-foot waterfalls, the bull kelp, and the clearcuts that look like the aftermath of a war. But no words can give you a true experience of the Tongass. The best I can do is to convince you that it's magnificent real estate we own. If you get a chance, go see it. In the meantime tell those we have employed to manage it.

(Donella H. Meadows is an adjunct professor of environmental studies at Dartmouth College.)