A Crossroads for Wilderness

Nothing the pulp companies did, legally or otherwise, and none of their copious subsidies enabled them to compete on the world timber market. In 1993 Alaska Pulp closed its mill. Four years later Ketchikan Pulp closed its mill, too. Now that the Forest Service didn't have to "feed the beasts," it finally had the opportunity to manage America's biggest and wildest national forest as the law required-for multiple values on a sustained basis. Michael Dombeck seized it.

In 1999, ruling on an administrative appeal by environmentalists, Dombeck's Forest Service amended its 1997 Tongass management plan, protecting 40 roadless areas, including most of the woods around Port Houghton. Recently, a timber-industry lawsuit has removed these protections, but instead of defending the Tongass plan in court, Bush's Justice Department took another dive, declining to appeal and, in fact, agreeing to pay attorneys fees for the plaintiffs before the case was even over. Again it aided and abetted the plaintiffs by expressing sympathy for their concerns. Now the Forest Service has retreated to the 1997 plan.

As all this was going down, the environmental community, led by Earthjustice, had been waging a court battle of its own, charging that Dombeck's amended 1999 Tongass management plan, otherwise to its liking, had violated the National Environmental Policy Act and the National Forest Management Act by failing to consider any of the roadless areas for wilderness, a designation that proscribes road building and logging. On March 30,2001, U.S. District Court Judge James Singleton Jr. found for the plaintiffs, halting all Tongass roadless timber sales authorized under the amended plan until the Forest Service finished studying the roadless areas for possible wilderness designation. The Forest Service pushed pencils around till May 17,2002, and then, in the first big wilderness decision of the Bush administration, announced that it had figured out that not one of the Tongass' 9.4 million roadless acres deserved wilderness protection. This would be its official recommendation going into the study's public comment period.

At first glance, the administration's behavior is hard to figure. These days timber doesn't even make a blip in southeast Alaska's economy, supporting only 2 percent of the workforce. What sustains the region is tourism and recreational, commercial, and subsistence fishing. The Tongass' 2,000 salmon and steelhead streams produce an annual sport catch of 1 million fish, a commercial catch of 160 million pounds, and a subsistence catch of 1.2 million pounds. There are people here-particularly Native Americans—who would literally starve without this resource. Leaving a Tongass tree for tourism and recreation contributes at least nine times more to the regional economy than cutting it for the timber industry. It's roughly the same everywhere. Throughout the national forest system, recreational activities generate almost $100 billion a year while logging generates $3.5 billion. What's more, traditional timber strip mining of the sort the Bush administration is resurrecting drastically reduces these income sources.

Technically, the old growth of temperate rain forests is a "renewable resource." But, technically, so is oil. As Ketchikan Pulp and Alaska Pulp have demonstrated, any industry based on old growth-which takes centuries to regenerate—hasn't got a chance. Before the two pulp mills went belly-up, they were swilling something like 350 million board feet of Tongass timber a year. Last year the Forest Service sold only 50 million board feet of Tongass timber, less than any year since 1942. The industry doesn't need new roads because it can access 10 billion board feet of standing timber from the forest's existing road system.

Using public funds and public resources to prop up a doomed industry would seem to make no sense. Cutting new roads when the Forest Service can't take care of the ones it has would seem to make no sense. What could be the motive other than pumping a little pork into the turf of two powerful Republican senators and a loud Republican congressman?

Maybe the motive has nothing to do with timber. Ten minutes by ferry from Gravina Island, likely site of the first of 30 roadless Tongass timber sales to be offered by the Bush administration, is Ketchikan, a city that gets 600,000 cruise-ship visitors a year. Gravina Island isn't entirely within the Tongass National Forest; about a third of it is in nonfederal ownership. With a timber sale would come an opportunity for a bridge connecting Gravina to the mainland. Then, on Gravina, the Forest Service would construct 23 miles of "logging" roads. The profits would be made by the developers who have drooled over Gravina for years. Many Ketchikan residents are repulsed at the prospect of resorts and industry on this wilderness island. As one of them asked the Los Angeles Times, "Where's the parking lot going to be? Where are the rest rooms going to be?"

Those who believe there are enough resorts, industries, parking lots, and rest rooms in and around our national forests may not have to wait and see what the Bush administration does. One possible option is the Alaska Rainforest Conservation Act, introduced September 20, 2001, by Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) with 78 of her House colleagues. It would protect about 15 million acres and 81 river systems in the Tongass and Chugach national forests, including Port Houghton and the 29 other roadless areas that are under immediate threat. Another option is the National Forest Roadless Area Conservation Act, introduced June 5, 2002, by Rep. Jay Inslee (D-Wash.) with Rep. Sherwood Boehlert (R-N.Y) and 172 co-sponsors. The legislation would force the Forest Service to implement Dombeck's roadless rule.

"We're sitting in a place that absolutely should be designated as new wilderness," declared Tim Bristol, director of an environmental alliance called the Alaska Coalition, as the sun dipped behind the Coast Range on our last evening in camp. "The thing that's most important to remember about wilderness is that you can do everything we're doing right now. You can come in here and hike, fish, hunt, take photographs, put out crab pots, build fires, cook. You can do all the things that make places like this so important to so many people. The only thing you can't do is screw it up."

I was itching for one last crack at the steelhead that held in the long run 100 yards from our campsite. As I cast to them, the words of Earthjustice's Marty Hayden came back to me: "We're losing places like this before we even know we have them." We'd been calling this stream the "Rusty River," but that's only one of the local names. It's not considered important enough to have an official name on government topo maps. Neither the Forest Service nor the Alaska Department of Fish and Game knows if coastal cutthroat trout abide in its water, but I know because I had caught one that moming. Fish and Game estimates the entire annual steelhead run here at 50 fish, but neither it nor the Forest Service has looked. The estimate is ridiculously low because, although the run had just started, we'd seen about 25 fresh fish that day, and during our stay we'd hooked or caught and released at least 30. Fish and Game guesses there are 335 other streams that sustain steelhead in the Tongass, but, again, neither it nor the Forest Service has looked.