![]() By Dominick A. DellaSala Like many who care about Alaska’s economy and its world-class rainforests, I witnessed the recent news coverage on the Big Thorne timber sale as the latest boxing match over old growth logging. Each prizefighter staked out familiar ground — conservationists sued over old growth logging, industry claimed the sky was falling and the Undersecretary of Agriculture assumed the referee position. Meanwhile, the promised transition out of old growth is dragging into the next decade as the mills and U.S. Forest Service claim they need to log old growth as a “bridge” to regenerating forests (second growth), originally cut in the 1950s, which are now ready to replace old-growth logging. The truth is the Forest Service and industry can make the transition happen right now in line with Alaska’s economy, which has diversified since the 1950s into tourism, fishing and recreation sectors. The logging industry can either ensure its downward slide by continuing to push rainforests and wolves to the brink or opt for sustainability and prosperity for Alaskans. The time for change is now. Recently, the Geos Institute together with the Natural Resources Defense Council, released a report by Mater Engineering (Corvallis Ore.-based forestry firm) on second-growth timber on the Tongass. Mater cooperated with the Forest Service, using their own timber inventory data for analysis, to provide an updated map and estimates of second growth available now and into the future. She also asked the Viking mill on Prince of Wales Island what it needed to make transition possible. Based on the Forest Service numbers and mill owner needs, Mater showed there is enough second growth right now to phase out old growth logging like the controversial Big Thorne sale. In just five years, there will be even more second growth to fast track transition while ending industrial-scale old growth logging across the Tongass. The Forest Service claims it can’t “change the law” to cut the 55-year-old trees required to accelerate transition. In fact, the law actually gives the agency broad discretion to harvest younger trees simply by amending the Tongass Land Management Plan. The timber industry claims it can’t market younger trees even though it is already doing this on its own lands. The Forest Service can take a much-needed positive step to assist the timber industry with a pilot project to assess the milling needs for smaller trees and their lumber. This will help establish markets and the capital investment needed for mills to retool for processing smaller logs like what is already happening on the Siuslaw National Forest in Oregon (“My Turn,” July 7). The Tongass rainforest is just too important to squander more of its precious old growth. It is one of the world’s last remaining relatively intact temperate rainforests, its salmon runs are surpassed by none, and its magnificent forests play a pivotal role in stabilizing global climate change by absorbing and storing massive amounts of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Ten or more years of cutting old growth will irreparably harm these values and squash hopes for a win-win. Swift action on the Tongass is needed by all parties as part of a robust Alaska economy where small is beautiful with respect to Tongass logs, economic sectors are compatible with what the rainforests can provide long-term, and what is taken out of the forest is processed locally. The Forest Service needs to shift out of its old growth program now. Industry can move Tongass small logs into the marketplace quickly without lawsuits. By backing second growth sales with logs processed locally, conservation groups can support an emerging sustainable industry. Under California’s Global Warming Solutions Act, Alaska’s private landowners can also get involved by improving forest management practices and then selling “carbon offsets” on the open exchange. Millions of dollars already are changing hands to compensate proactive landowners who manage their forests to store more carbon so companies can purchase global warming pollution abatements. Southeast Alaska could be an incubator for innovative ideas like these instead of a battleground. All parties are talking transition, but it requires demonstrable actions now to succeed and not more foot-dragging. Dominick A. DellaSala is chief scientist and president at Geos Institute and author of the award winning book “Temperate and Boreal Rainforests of the World: Ecology and Conservation” (Island Press, 2011). He lives in Talent, Ore. This column originally appeared in The Juneau Empire. ![]() By Austin Williams After pledging in 2010 to bring about an end to old-growth logging on the Tongass National Forest, the U.S. Forest Service has failed to find first gear, and may have ground the shifter into reverse. Last week, despite staunch public opposition, the Forest Service approved the largest old-growth timber sale on the Tongass in more than twenty years. It plans to cut nearly 150 million board-feet of timber from more than 6,000 acres of old-growth and 2,000 acres of second growth on southeast Alaska’s famed Prince of Wales Island—home to some of the best wild salmon and steelhead runs in the world. I first came to Alaska in 2003 to work for the U.S. Forest Service on Prince of Wales Island. As a recent college graduate more interested in chasing fish and drinking beer than most anything else, Thorne Bay was a great place to call home. What island life lacked in cheap beer it more than made up for in wild salmon, steelhead, cutthroat and Dolly Varden. I’d get up around 4:00 each morning, chase fish for a few hours before showing up to work at 8:00, tromp around the woods all day doing stream surveys, fish or tie flies in the evening, then rinse and repeat for the next day. Life was good. I caught a ton of fish, drank my share of overpriced PBR, and helped lay the groundwork for the first comprehensive watershed restoration project on the Tongass National Forest: Sal Creek. The Tongass, which is our largest national forest and encompasses 80% of the landbase in southeast Alaska, produces a TON of salmon. More than 15,700 miles of streams and 4,100 lakes and ponds on the Tongass produce hundreds of millions of wild salmon annually. These salmon support the most valuable commercial salmon fishery in Alaska, help attract more than a million out-of-state tourists each year, and make the region a great place to explore with a fly rod. Of course, the Tongass, and Prince of Wales Island in particular, has also been the site of some of the most intensive logging in North America. For decades following World War II through the 1990’s, many of the largest, most valuable trees in the Tongass were chewed up into pulp by two large mills. These pulp mills benefited from 50-year contracts that required the Forest Service to supply hundreds of millions of board-feet annually. As you can imagine, logging on this scale had some very significant impacts to salmon streams—and putting these streams back in working order has been a major challenge ever since. In Sal Creek on the northeast coast of Prince of Wales Island, logging in the 1960s and 1970s had cut down nearly every tree of any size in the entire floodplane and most nearby slopes. Roads crisscrossed back and forth across Sal Creek and its tributaries, and rarely provided adequate accommodation for salmon migration. Not long before I arrived, a landslide from one of these roads ripped apart the headwaters dumping who-knows-how-much dirt and debris into the stream. Things were a mess. Then, as part of a multi-year partnership between TU and the Forest Service, TU-secured funding became available to design and implement a comprehensive restoration project in Sal Creek. Large logs and root wads, the like of which had long been removed from the stream, were introduced back into the creek at strategic locations to improve salmon spawning and rearing habitat. Highly eroded stream banks were stabilized. Unnaturally long, high-gradient riffles were recontoured into productive riffle-pool habitat. Roads were decommissioned. Today, the benefits of these restoration efforts are apparent as coho, pink and chum salmon return to Sal Creek each year in increased numbers. Coastal cutthroat and Dolly Varden also appear in greater populations. While work in Sal Creek set the stage for numerous other watershed restoration projects throughout the Tongass, and tremendous strides have been made in Southeast Alaska over the past decade, the story isn’t all rosy. Just last week, despite significant public outcry over impacts to fish and wildlife and escalating costs, the Forest Service announced it is moving forward with its largest timber sale on the Tongass in more than twenty years. The Big Thorne timber sale, which authorizes the logging of more than 6,000 acres of the last remaining old-growth forest on Prince of Wales Island, sits squarely around Sal Creek and its neighboring watersheds. In addition to further increasing the backlog of unmet restoration needs, currently estimated by the Forest Service at more than $100 million, the Big Thorne timber sale will also undercut the region’s two largest sources of employment, salmon fishing and tourism, and cost taxpayers many millions of dollars. Sal Creek, which is partly protected from the Big Thorne timber sale simply because the Forest Service already logged all the valuable trees out of the watershed decades ago, should serve as a lesson learned—an example of how to recognize, fix and move beyond the errors of our past. Unfortunately, the Forest Service in this instance remains high centered on timber and unable to see what everyone else in the region already knows: that southeast Alaska salmon are too special and too valuable to sacrifice. ![]() Jim Furnish, a former top U.S. Forest Service official, has a strong message for his former bosses – stop the ecologically-damaging and money-losing practice of old-growth logging in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest and do it now. In an editorial published in the Juneau Empire this week, Furnish laid out a compelling case for why Forest Service officials should “make a clean break” with Tongass old-growth logging and do this “as quickly as possible.” Furnish supervised Oregon’s Siuslaw National Forest during the spotted owl crisis of the 1990s. He decided to stop clear-cutting of Siuslaw old-growth timber and instead shift the focus to second-growth harvest. That decision essentially ended environmental lawsuits or appeals to stop logging and the Siuslaw has been producing a reliable, sustainable timber harvest of 40 million board feet annually ever since. The same thing should happen on the Tongass, he argues. Among other things, Furnish cites a recent study using the Forest Service’s own data that concludes that a full transition from old-growth to second-growth logging can happen on the Tongass immediately. He’s right. Read the full text of the column here. ![]() Kids and salmon. Hot dogs and a parade. What could be better? Trout Unlimited Alaska helped put those pieces together on July 4th in partnership with Discovery Southeast, a Juneau-based outdoor education non-profit that connects elementary-age children with nature, including Southeast Alaska’s Tongass rainforest. TU and other fishery organizations sponsored a float in Juneau’s Fourth of July parade, created by Discovery Southeast, where children navigated an improvised salmon stream made of fabric and “spawned” in the upper reaches of the stream. “We had adults holding a fabric river. The kids had a great time ‘swimming’ up the river, grabbing the candy, and then ‘spawning’ by running out to the crowd to distribute the goodies. The kids wore salmon costumes, including t-shirts with sponsors’ names on the back and the fish prints on the front,” said Shawn Eisele, executive director of Discovery Southeast. “The simple message of kids having fun as salmon running up a river was priceless,” said Eisele. Discovery Southeast runs summer camps and offers classroom instruction and fields trips throughout the year. It’s been connecting kids to nature for the past 25 years. ![]() By BRENDAN JONES As a resident of Sitka, in southeast Alaska, I’ve worked in the local commercial fishing industry on and off for the past 17 years. This summer I’ll go out on the boat once more, in search of salmon, which have become one of the drivers of the region’s economic recovery. This year, though, the fishing fleet in southeast Alaska will work under the shadow of an announcement by the United States Forest Service that it intends to approve the Big Thorne timber sale, which would allow the logging industry to harvest about 6,200 acres of remnant old-growth trees in Tongass National Forest, the world’s largest remaining temperate rain forest. It would be the most destructive old-growth cut in the forest in the past 20 years. The salmon need those trees to spawn. This means we need those trees. Here’s how a salmon forest works. In a healthy system, the old-growth western hemlock and Sitka spruce provide a moderating influence for the stream environment; large trees along the banks help cool water in the summer and warm it in the winter. The forested hillsides absorb rainfall and snow melt, ensuring a steady flow of current for the hatching and spawning fish. But when timber companies arrive, punching in their roads and clear-cutting, gone are the trees and root wads that create a diverse stream environment. Now the water runs in flash floods down the bare hillsides, washing away the fish eggs and silting up the spawning grounds. It’s sad, and it’s bad business. Fishing — and tourism — are directly responsible for the recovering economy in southeast Alaska. Jobs and people trickled away for 10 years, from 1997 to 2007. But in the past two years alone, 1,800 new jobs were created, largely because of good fishing. Population in the southeast is at an all-time high, with more than 74,000 residents, and employment increased by 10 percent over the two-year period from 2010 to 2012. Last year, the salmon harvest set a record at 272 million fish. (Juiced up on coffee and peanut butter bars, my skipper and I caught about 25,000 of these.) That’s good business, and the fishery, managed by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, has proved sustainable. But the Forest Service, buffeted by lobbying pressures and subject to a 1990 Congressional mandate to seek to meet demand for Tongass timber, is stuck in an outdated “get out the cut” mind-set that made sense back when timber was southeast Alaska’s economic backbone. The era of clear-cutting old-growth stands, however, is over. Once accounting for some 3,500 jobs, timber now provides fewer than 300 jobs a year. This includes sawmills, logging, logging support and wood-product manufacturing. At one point, pulp mills and sawmills hummed away throughout southeast Alaska. Now only one major sawmill remains. Today, the Tongass National Forest — at 17 million acres the largest national forest in the country — produces exponentially more value in fish than it does in timber. Salmon alone generate nearly a billion dollars. As for logging, it actually costs taxpayers more than $20 million annually for timber programs and logging roads, even after timber sales receipts are taken into account. To be clear, I’m not anti-logging. The harvesting of young growth and second growth could play an important role in Southeast’s recovery. But when the Forest Service makes a timber sale, it’s geared toward larger, out-of-town companies that can exit the state quickly. Small-scale local operations can’t afford the large tracts the Forest Service makes available, nor do they have the equipment to complete the cut by the required deadline. In more depressing news for the local economy, in February the Forest Service released a newsletter that concluded that as a result of a 42 percent cut in funding in the past five years, it can “no longer maintain” the current recreation and trail infrastructure and must reduce its inventory. There goes the tourism. The Forest Service itself has identified more than $100 million in unmet “watershed restoration work” (Forest Service-speak for “we really jammed this stream up good and should probably do something about it”). The agency has estimated that it will take more than 50 years to redress the problems logging in the Tongass has already caused wild salmon. Here’s a crazy idea: Instead of prioritizing large-scale timber sales, what if the Forest Service protected the Tongass? What if it joined up with local groups like the Sitka Conservation Society and became a willing partner in aggressive stream restoration and cabin and trail maintenance? Salmon would have their spawning grounds, and tourists who come to Alaska to see one of the last wild places on earth wouldn’t find in its place a moonscape. In a few weeks I’ll pack my dry-bag with my fishing bibs and ratty Carhartts and sweatshirt with the cuffs lopped off, whistle the dog onto a salmon troller named Saturday and head out with my skipper into the open waters. Word is it’s already shaping up to be a good summer. But if we get down to Prince of Wales Island, near those 6,200 acres of spruce and hemlock slated to be cut, I’ll want to spend an afternoon following those majestic salmon upstream, right up to where they lay their eggs, in the shadows of those ancient trees. And I’ll be thinking about the narrator in Cormac McCarthy’s novel “The Road,” observing fish in a stream: “On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again.” I hope the Forest Service chooses to become a partner in Southeast Alaska’s economic and ecological restoration, instead of its enemy, while things still can be made right. This op-ed originally appeared in the New York Times on May 21, 2104. |
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