Alaska Divided by a Tale of Two Forests

It is the emerald forest of myth: a land of brooding trees and fog-swathed fiords, high fields of ice and coves thick with fish, sprawling 500 miles across the edge of a continent. It is the last great green land.

Straddling Alaska’s famed Inside Passage, the Tongass National Forest is the largest and most intact temperate rain forest on Earth--17 million acres, bigger than all the national forests of Oregon combined.

Forty years after the federal government launched a campaign to tame the Tongass by churning its timber into a network of pulp mills and sawmills, the future of its remaining grand old stands of Sitka spruce and hemlock has erupted into one of the biggest resource battles of the 1990s.

The decision on whether to save or sell the wooded valleys--completion of a new land management plan is expected later this month--will make or break an economy that has sustained Southeast Alaska since statehood.

Just as important, the Tongass debate will force the nation to confront its historic ambivalence about the advancing frontier, a line that has pushed steadily westward for 370 years and, of geographic necessity, has stopped here at this line of big trees.

All the issues that have fueled the Pacific Northwest timber wars in recent decades are now converging here, home to the nation’s last healthy wild salmon runs, decimated elsewhere; a network of raw timber towns--places like Sitka, Ketchikan and Wrangell--whose survival has depended on the big mills that are shutting their doors; a booming tourism industry that depends on the Tongass to captivate visitors cruising the Inside Passage.

And the question often asked is: Whose Alaska is it anyway?

“I guess the real danger signal . . . is that there clearly is a push by many people who have a significant amount of power to shut down all of Alaska. And I’m assuming they’re going to turn it into some great big national park, whereby only tourists can visit,” said Mark Suwyn, CEO of Louisiana-Pacific Corp., in announcing plans to shut down the aging pulp mill at Ketchikan--a death blow to industrial forestry in the region.

“The last temperate rain forest? Well, yeah. But we’re some of the last people that live up here too,” said Ketchikan borough Mayor Jack Shay. “A lot of this environmental movement comes from people who have a lot of guilt about what they didn’t protect in their own backyards. We are kind of being held hostage for the collective guilt . . . and that kind of irritates us.”

Yet a growing number of Southeast Alaskans see the decision to close down the Ketchikan mill--500 workers will lose their jobs in March, maybe twice that number if the company doesn’t come to agreement with the government over timber supplies for two remaining sawmills--as an opportunity. Now is the time, they say, to save what’s left of the forest, to develop a home-grown wood-products industry that cuts fewer trees and uses it to better effect at home.

“The contracts for those mills were established in the ‘50s, when the Tongass was viewed as one big tree farm. Alaska was a territory, and the timber seemed endless,” said Bart Koehler, executive director of the Southeast Alaska Conservation Council, which has battled for a slowdown in logging on the Tongass. “All that’s changed now. The era of the timber barons is over.”

Threat to Forest Underestimated?

In the early 1950s the federal government, eager to jump-start the faltering fishing economy of the Alaskan Panhandle, signed long-term contracts for the delivery of cheap Tongass wood that set up two major pulp mills in Sitka and Ketchikan and opened the way for a network of sawmills elsewhere in the region.

Suddenly there were jobs, and not just any jobs. Ketchikan mill workers were taking home salaries of $41,000 a year; big new houses started sprouting up on the hillsides of the gritty old fishing town, as did car dealerships and fast-food restaurants. Meanwhile, the thickest groves of old-growth timber, spruce trees 500 years old and more, were rushed into production to feed the pulp mills’ decades-long contracts. Between 1954 and 1993, 10,000 acres a year fell to the chain saws.

Yet the Tongass is so big that it can be hard to see what all the agonizing is about.

It remains an astonishingly productive wildlife habitat, sheltering the world’s largest concentrations of grizzly bears, bald eagles and Sitka black-tailed deer. Wolves, in decline around the nation, are abundant here. Wild salmon, disappearing in the Pacific Northwest, choke the streams of the Tongass on their spawning runs.

With establishment of national monuments at Admiralty Island and Misty Fjords and other wilderness areas, about 86% of the forest has been placed in reserves, including 6.3 million acres of designated wilderness. Only 1.7 million acres are designated for logging. And forest industry representatives note that 93% of the Tongass’ old-growth trees are still standing.

But conservation groups say those figures sharply underestimate the threat to the survival of the Tongass as a productive wilderness. In fact, they say, only about 4% of the forest contains the prime stands of high-volume, old-growth trees that the timber industry covets--and which alone can assure the survival of species that depend on its heavy forest canopy to survive the harsh winters.

As much as 40% of that prime forest land is already gone, they say, warning that current policy (clear-cut logging on short-term rotations) will wipe out nearly all of it in the coming decades.

A panel of scientists advising the U.S. Forest Service seems to agree on many points, insisting that old-growth-dependent species will not survive under any plan that includes short-rotation clear-cuts.

No wonder Phil Janik, a former biologist who now oversees all of Alaska’s federal forests, looked harried one recent afternoon as he rushed from meeting to meeting, trying to meet a deadline for completing the plan by the end of the year.

“With the closure of the mills, the question is: ‘Does that mean you’re going to redo your plan?’ The answer is no,” Janik said. “Our obligation as an agency is to help provide the opportunities for [the region] to take advantage of, but all that has to be taken in the context of the capability of the land.”

Way of Life Threatened

The steaming pulp mill a few miles north of Ketchikan accounts, directly or indirectly, for 20% of the town’s labor force, 38% of the spending in local stores, a quarter of the tax base and almost all of the real estate market.

Not surprising, then, that when the call went out to extend the pulp company’s contract and save the mill, there wasn’t a lot of debate.

“It’s real sad. Sometimes I can sit and cry because what I’ve seen in the past as a way of life [has been] turned by the environmentalists into something that’s wrong,” said Sandra Meske, payroll chief at the pulp company, who will be among the 400 to 500 workers who lose their jobs next spring.

“The pulp mill goes down March 24. We lose 500 jobs. That includes mine. Most people don’t know Ketchikan is an island. Most people don’t know that I can’t go down the street and find a new job.”

Yet a small but growing number of Ketchikan residents in recent years had begun wondering what the belching smoke from the mill, sometimes containing poisonous sulfur dioxide, was doing to the health of the community. Was it a good idea, they wondered, for people to keep fishing in Ward Cove when the mill was dumping millions of gallons of toxic pollutants into the tiny waterway each year?

What they found was that most people in Ketchikan didn’t want to hear about it.

Wayne Weihing worked for 21 years as a pipe-fitter and welder at the mill before leaving and beginning to document instances of illegal toxic discharges from the plant. He got a phone call one night this summer, as the fight to extend the mill’s contract--and keep it open for another 15 years--came to a head.

“There were some preludes,” Weihing recalled. “And then he said, ‘I’m going to kill you.’ He hung up.”

Leslie Engler, another anti-pollution activist, had her car windshield broken when she was photographing discharges from the mill.

“All these things keep happening to people who are just trying to find out why they keep waking up every night at 1:30 gagging and choking and your nose bleeding,” Engler said. “All we have been saying is, those trees have more dollar value standing there and being beautiful than they have being cut down and turned into mush.”

One Town Manages Successful Transition

Sitka was supposed to be dead by now. When the Alaska Pulp Co. shut down operations in September 1993, most people figured Sitka would go on the skids.

The town of Wrangell did. After losing its sawmill and 250 jobs in 1994, Wrangell now has a jobless rate of nearly 20%, triple the state average, and welfare rolls have climbed more than 11%. People don’t want to hear about government help anymore. When talk turned last month to the $110-million federal disaster-relief fund to help Southeast Alaska withstand the mill closures, a petition started up. Write out a check for $10,000 to everybody left in town, it said.

Sitka’s story, to all appearances, has been different. To be sure, the population dropped 380 people (about the number of mill jobs lost), and the average local salary dropped about $1,100 a year.

Yet the real estate market is booming--big houses are going up all over the hillsides, many of them built by well-off California retirees. Summer tourists are flocking in all spring and summer and, thanks to a big expansion at the government-funded Native Health Clinic, there are still lots of high-paying jobs in Sitka. For many, this is the best example of life-after-timber in Southeast Alaska.

But look again, cautions Mayor Peter Hallgren. Half the people in Sitka who still have jobs work for the government.

“What I’m seeing here is a really scary economy. We’re so much better off than we have any right to be. But we’ve still not reached the point where the grocery stores are selling as much as they were before the mill closed, for example. Unemployment is about 5.3%, but that’s because a lot of people have left. I think the people who want to paint an impossibly rosy picture are possibly missing something here,” Hallgren said.

A recent initiative to order the local government to oppose all clear-cut logging in the area around Sitka came within four votes of passage. A similar measure is on the ballot in February, and many expect it to win.

Yet there remains a widespread sentiment that much is being made about the health of a forest that appears vigorous and lovely--a hue and cry that comes at the expense of a growing number of personal tragedies.

“Some people from New York don’t give a damn whether we have any jobs or not, but the people of Southeast sure as heck do. The vast majority of people here still would like to see expanded logging on the Tongass,” said Don Keck, Sitka’s former mayor.

“Where’s the harm? I’ve never heard one cruise ship person mention seeing a clear-cut. Not one. Those people will try to tell you logging has hurt tourism. Well, just look at the growth. Some people think we have too many tourists now. We have more fish than we can sell. Bears have improved. When I moved here in 1960, we were allowed [to hunt] two deer. Now, we’re allowed six. So has it hurt? Has it really hurt anything? To me, I can’t see that it has.”

Ketchikan officials already are turning away from arguing about timber harvests and are talking about alternatives: small wood companies, supplied by local loggers from a smaller harvest; building a bridge to the airport, now serviced by ferry; upgrading the shipyard to lure vessels now maintained down in Washington.

“I look at it as an opportunity,” Shay said. “Fate seldom closes one door without opening another.”