Clear-Cut Debate Gets Cloudy

As the Bush administration loosens the reins on logging in the nation’s last remaining roadless areas, the emerald island of hemlock and spruce just across the water from here is emerging as the first battleground.

A major initiative to set aside more than 58.5 million acres of roadless areas, adopted by President Clinton early this year, would have halted logging on much of Alaska’s Tongass National Forest. Instead, the U.S. Forest Service, in a bid to bolster southeast Alaska’s flagging timber industry, is preparing a plan to log up to 37 million board feet of timber from the heart of America’s largest remaining temperate rain forest.

The proposed timber sale, scheduled to be decided by early next year, would allow the construction of up to 22 miles of roads and clear the way for limited industrial development in one of America’s few stretches of true wilderness. It is a land inhabited by bald eagles, deer and black bears and shrouded by the perpetual mists that float through these legendary fiords.

The Tongass, at 17 million acres America’s largest national forest, is in a league of its own in the national debate over roadless areas.

In places such as Montana and Idaho, highways and logging roads cut through the mountains. Here, there are hardly any roads. People get from town to town by boat or plane. Even bears cross to the next wooded island with an awkward approximation of a dog paddle.

Some say it is foolish to include the Tongass in a federal policy restricting logging and road building in roadless areas. It would shut down Alaska’s whole timber industry.

Others say that’s the point: If everything else has had roads graded through it, if there’s just one big American rain forest left, why send bulldozers and logging trucks into any of it?

A decision to log on Gravina Island would clear the way for the first roadless area timber sale since Clinton’s sweeping protections were expanded to include the Tongass. A federal judge in Idaho suspended that policy in May, and the Bush administration last month issued an interim directive that calls for the head of the U.S. Forest Service to approve development in most roadless areas on a case-by-case basis.

The debate unfolding here provides a clear window on the national dilemma over balancing wilderness and resource production, between the need for timber jobs in struggling communities and the tourism economy’s dependence on vistas unmarred by clear-cutting.

“You look at the rest of the U.S. and there’s nothing. There are no large, wild areas,” said Brian McNitt of the Southeast Alaska Conservation Council, which is seeking to protect the Tongass from logging. “On the Tongass, we still have many large, intact wild systems . . . and every day those areas are more valuable in a global sense--for wildlife diversity, for recreation and for wilderness values.”

On the other hand, consider the town of Ketchikan, just a 10-minute ferry ride across a narrow inlet from Gravina. Ketchikan’s pulp mill closed in 1996, taking with it most of the town’s best-paying jobs. Gravina timber would help feed the small sawmill left in town, not to mention the new veneer plant, already mired in bankruptcy despite millions of dollars in government subsidies.

But even more important to this town would be the 22 miles of roads the Forest Service would build to get to the timber. Ketchikan business leaders envision a bridge from their tiny community, which is locked in by mountains and water, over to Gravina and a logging road that eventually would sprout resorts and new industry. The roads also would allow Ketchikan residents to hunt and fish in a forest that is practically next door but now is too isolated to reach.

“The real prize is not the timber,” said Wayne Weihing of the Tongass Conservation Society. “It’s the redesignation of that island as a roaded area.”

Once there were temperate rain forests along nearly every continent, ecosystems that drew their sustenance from the constant cycling of water between land and sea. They have disappeared over most of Europe; a few fragments remain in Chile, New Zealand and Tasmania; but it is southeast Alaska--the Tongass--and coastal British Columbia that hold most of what is left.

So the fight over the Tongass has been international in scope and has gone on for years. It was supposed to have been resolved by a land-use management plan in 1997 that protected about 96% of the forest and allowed logging of 267 million board feet per year on the rest. The Clinton administration moved to protect even more, cutting back timber sales to about 187 million board feet a year. But that action has been blocked by the courts.

Now that the Bush directive has put the forest back into play, the final outcome of the roadless debate will be crucial here: Two-thirds of the timber scheduled to be logged on the Tongass in the next 10 years lies in roadless areas, including Gravina Island.

Conservationists argue that there is plenty of timber, an estimated 10 billion board feet, along the 4,600 miles of roads already laced through parts of the Tongass.

But much of that is young forest and won’t be ready to cut for years, industry officials say. With mills teetering on bankruptcy, how long are they supposed to hold on?

“Look, we’re not going to cut every tree here,” said George Woodbury, president of the Alaska Forest Assn., an industry group. “But most people are not going to be able to hike up or swim up the Inside Passage to see it. In order to get here, there’s got to be an infrastructure--and that means an economy of some kind.”

The logging proposals under review would generate up to 346 jobs a year and cost taxpayers up to $11.2 million in road-building costs and other subsidies.

Forest Service officials, who will decide how much logging to allow on Gravina Island, say the two proposals they are looking at are conservative and unlikely to have a large effect on the 64,000-acre island.

“There’s always some risk [to the environment] if you’re going to build roads and do timber harvests,” said Cameron Thomas, fishery biologist for the Forest Service. “But with the forest plan and the protections that are built into it, the risks are probably minimal. If we were to choose the most intense harvest alternative, would that wipe out the fish, for example? Or even reduce the fish population? I would say no,” Cameron said.

But it all comes back to the roads. Logging might not wipe out the fish, said Elmer Makua, a member of the native Alaskan Tongass tribe, whose people historically have used Gravina as a place to harvest clams, salmon, deer, berries and cedar bark for subsistence.

One of the proposals puts a road and log collection facility along Bostwick Inlet, the premier Dungeness crab area, Makua said. The other roads have the potential to bring hunters and fishermen from all over the world into the heart of an island now accessible only to those hardy enough to get there on their own.

“How do you build a logging road for recreation and still protect our sacred sites?” Makua said. “Where’s the parking lot going to be? Where are the restrooms going to be? The only thing they’ve planned is a timber sale.”