U.S. Forest Service Support for Logging in Alaskan Rain Forest Assailed

Mountains rose abruptly from a sapphire-blue sea as the tiny bush plane droned lazily toward Chichagof Island. Seen from a distance, forests unfolded as carpets of green, flawless and unbroken.

Then rocky peaks and alpine meadows flashed by the wing tips, and the forest took on a different character. Patches of cleared land and scrub showed the effect of heavy logging. In some places, whole valley bottoms had been scraped bare, leaving only the least-valuable timber at higher elevations.

Matt Kirchoff, a deer research biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, pointed to one of the logged patches. “It virtually wipes out that whole hillside as far as winter range for deer,” he said. “That’s exactly the stuff they should leave.”

Each year, logging claims about 10,000 acres of the Tongass, a 17-million-acre swath of southeastern Alaska that includes the largest intact remnant of temperate rain forest in North America--in terms of biological importance, the closest thing in the United States to the tropical rain forests of central and South America.

The best trees in the Tongass are going fastest: Loggers are concentrating on the highest-quality virgin forests--cathedral-like stands of hemlock and Sitka spruce, some more than 400 years old.

The logging continues in the face of mounting scientific evidence that such old-growth forests--especially the high-yield variety coveted by loggers--play a unique role in protecting wildlife. Deer, bear and salmon have already suffered from logging in some areas, state wildlife biologists say, and studies suggest that the number of bald eagles could decline sharply in future decades.

Conservationists blame the federal government.

Under a unique program aimed at preserving timber-industry jobs, the U.S. Forest Service spends $40 million a year building roads and taking other steps to accommodate logging in the Tongass. But it recoups only a tiny percentage of its expenditures when it sells the logs to two pulp companies. These two companies cut the timber for lumber and dissolving pulp, then ship the products to Japan and other Asian countries.

Since 1980, the Forest Service has lost about $350 million on Tongass timber sales, according to congressional estimates.

“They really got a blank check with no oversight and no accountability, and they’re reluctant to give it up,” said Joe Mehrkens, a former Forest Service economist in the Tongass region who now lobbies against the program for the Wilderness Society.

The Forest Service defends the program as essential to the economic health of southeast Alaska, and it says significant portions of the temperate rain forest are protected in 5.6 million acres of designated wilderness. Logging practices have been modified to reflect environmental concerns, officials said.

“Logging is not destruction,” said Wayne Nicolls, a Forest Service spokesman in Juneau. “It’s a change in the landscape. It’s the removal of a resource.”

Conservationists are not the only ones to object to the Forest Service’s management practices. The Tongass timber program also is opposed by commercial fishermen, tour operators and native Alaskans who depend on the forest for food. “If they continue to manage the Tongass as a tree farm, it will be lost forever,” said Bart Koehler, director of the Southeast Alaska Conservation Council.

The conservationists won an important round in July, when the House overwhelmingly passed a bill that would end the special Tongass subsidy and create new wilderness areas. A similar measure is under consideration in the Senate, where it faces stiff opposition from Alaska Sens. Ted Stevens and Frank H. Murkowski, both Republicans.

The conservationists argue that the timber subsidy has failed to preserve jobs and that the forest would better serve the local economy if more of it was off-limits to chain saws. “We’re not advocating getting rid of the timber industry,” Koehler said. “We’re trying to restructure it and make it more sustainable.”

Sprawled across the islands and coast of Alaska’s 500-mile panhandle, the nation’s largest publicly owned forest covers an area the size of West Virginia and Delaware combined. It is one of the last truly wild places in the United States. Some areas harbor one grizzly bear per square mile, the highest concentration in the United States. Parts of the Tongass have never been explored.

But perhaps the rarest feature of the Tongass, much of which consists of rocks and glaciers, is the rain forest. Covering valleys that are watered by mountain streams and gathered like skirts around the lower slopes, the forest is the largest remnant of a thick green carpet that once covered much of the Pacific Northwest.

The middle of a stand of old-growth evergreens is similar to a cool, damp cellar. Typically, the rain forest is five to 10 degrees cooler than surrounding areas in summer, and that much warmer in winter. Sunlight penetrates the canopy in distinct, slanted columns.

Sustained by an average annual rainfall of 8 feet, old-growth evergreens often grow to 200 feet in the Tongass. The trees shelter a rich variety of birds and other wildlife, and biologists say they are virtually irreplaceable: Although trees will grow back in logged areas, the forests they create are not the same.

Few animals illustrate the dilemma better than the Sitka black-tailed deer. In winter, thick stands of old-growth trees shelter the deer from snow, allowing them to forage for plants and berries that thrive on the forest floor. Logging robs them of that shelter. Moreover, when the forest grows back, it does so without the undergrowth that provides the deer with food, biologists say.

Two centuries can pass before second-growth forests assume the characteristics of old-growth, the Forest Service says.

Damage to Salmon Charged

In addition, commercial fishermen charge that excessive logging has damaged streams in the Tongass, threatening the region’s valuable salmon fisheries. During an unusual spell of hot, dry weather earlier this summer, 10,000 salmon died in Staney Creek on Prince of Wales Island, where logging has deprived the stream of shade, said K. Koski, a National Marine Fisheries Service habitat specialist. “I don’t think there’s any question that logging has increased the temperature of that stream,” Koski said.

Although the Forest Service dismisses the salmon deaths as inconclusive, it agrees that logging and wildlife are sometimes incompatible. In a recent environmental impact statement, the Forest Service predicted that bald eagles in one area of the Tongass would decline by more than 50% between 1950 and 2050. Similar declines were forecast for Sitka black-tailed deer, hairy woodpeckers and martens.

“You will change the species that associate with those stands,” said Gary Morrison, Forest Service supervisor for the northern part of the Tongass. “We don’t really know what some of this is going to do over a long period of time.”

Bears’ Numbers Shrink

Morrison expressed concern over the diminishing bear population on northern Chichagof Island, where 300 miles of logging roads have opened the area to hunting and other human activity. “Once we started building that road system, the number of bears shot began to go up considerably,” he said.

The situation in the Tongass dates from the 1950s, when the government sought to establish a regional logging industry with offers of cheap, plentiful timber. Long-term contracts still exist with two companies, Louisiana Pacific-Ketchikan Pulp Co. and Alaska Pulp Co., owned by a consortium of Japanese businesses. Their primary product, dissolving pulp, is a key ingredient in rayon and cellophane.

Then, in 1980, Congress passed the Alaska Lands Act, which set aside vast portions of the state as wilderness. To compensate the industry for the loss of potential logging areas in the Tongass, Congress came up with a unique guarantee: The Forest Service would offer for sale an average of 450 million board feet of timber each year, regardless of market conditions. Logging roads would be built whether the companies wanted the timber or not. Traditionally, the companies have taken less than the amount available to them.

Favoritism Charged

Critics say the program has grossly distorted the local economy, favoring the two pulp companies over thousands of fishermen, hunters and tourists who come to see wilderness, not clear cuts. “There’s no other national forest where forest management affects everyone’s lives in the regional economy as it does here,” Mehrkens said. “And there’s no other national forest that has its hands tied in not being able to respond to a broad spectrum of users.”

Industry spokesmen assert that timber provides 8,000 jobs in southeastern Alaska and that the government has an obligation to keep its promises. “People have bought houses and communities have developed based on what the government said was going to be a stable timber supply,” said Frank Roppel, Alaska Pulp’s executive vice president. “We made a huge investment.”

Such arguments are common in Sitka, the placid oceanfront village where Alaska Pulp is located. “They want to make it a big park,” Robert LaGuire, a retired pulp mill employee, said of the conservationists. “You’ll have to get a permit to take a log off the beach.”

But the Forest Service says that it is sensitive to the criticism of conservation groups and that it is already taking steps to address their concerns. Loggers are often required to pass over strips of forest along the coast that are visible to passing ferries and tour boats. And officials said they generally try to prohibit cutting along the banks of sensitive salmon streams.

“We’re managing the forests for our customers, the U.S. public,” said Lynn Sprague, deputy regional forester in Juneau. “It does appear the public is saying the balance has tipped too far.”