TONGASS FOREST RAZING ALASKA The Destruction of the Tongass Forest by Jonathan Dushoff Jonathan Dushoff works with the Washington, D.C.-based Taxpayer Assets Project, which examines the U.S. government's management of a wide range of assets. The U.S. Forest Service faces charges of administering the 17 million acre Tongass National Forest primarily for the benefit of two large timber companies: the Alaska Pulp Corporation (APC), owned by a Japanese group, and the Ketchikan Pulp Company (KPC), a subsidiary of the U.S. multinational Louisiana-Pacific. Critics charge that the Forest Service has cut trees in areas that were important to wildlife survival, failed to protect fish streams and ignored subsistence needs. Covering an area larger than West Virginia, the Tongass is a vital resource for many groups: its populations of deer and fish provide food for local communities; its stands of huge old spruce and hemlock trees support a large logging industry; its streams rear 90 percent of the salmon that are the basis of a large commercial fishing industry in southeast Alaska; it supports the largest concentrations of bald eagles and grizzly bears in the country and also populations of black bears, otters, woodpeckers and pine martins; and its scenic beauty draws tourists to the area. The Tongass is huge, but most of its area is covered by rock and ice, tundra vegetation or scrub trees. The controversy is focused on the forest's most productive areas, often found in stream valleys, which support high-volume closed-canopy forests of high quality, old spruce trees which are easily accessible to the timber companies. These areas are also important for wildlife and fish protection, however. Timber industry supporters dismiss environmental critics by pointing out that over 90 percent of the Tongass will never be logged. But Bart Koehler of the Southeast Alaska Conservation Council says the area that is scheduled for cutting is "the biological heart of the forest." He adds, "It's as if somebody came to you and said, 'I'm going to cut out your heart, but don't worry because 90 percent of you will still be OK."' Logging subsidies The Forest Service, which is responsible for managing the Tongass, has a long history of favoring the timber industry. The two pulp mills were drawn to southeast Alaska in the 1950s by generous fifty-year contracts offered by the Forest Service as an incentive to build mills which were considered a risky investment. The contracts included prices for timber purchased from the National Forest that could be adjusted down but not up over five-year periods, a guaranteed exclusive timber supply and substantial latitude to choose what timber to cut. In 1980, Congress passed the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA), setting aside large areas of wilderness in Alaska for preservation, including 5.4 million acres in the Tongass. Under the threat of a filibuster from Senator Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, Congress inserted a provision to protect the southeast Alaska timber industry: the Act provided for a permanent appropriation of "at least $40,000,000 annually or as much as the Secretary of Agriculture finds necessary to maintain the timber supply from the Tongass National Forest to dependent industry at a rate of 4.5 billion board feet measure per decade." (A board foot is a 12 inch by 12 inch by 1 inch board of timber.) Between 1980 and 1988, the Forest Service sold an average of 470 million board feet each year from the Tongass, while an average of only 320 million board feet per year was harvested. The General Accounting Office (GAO) calculated that unnecessary infrastructure constructed for the unharvested area cost the Forest Service $131 million from fiscal years 1981 to 1986. Roads built to make this excess timber available--"roads to nowhere"--have become a symbol of the wastefulness of the Forest Service's operations in the Tongass. The timber companies have been accused of "highgrading" the forest--taking the best and most valuable trees and stands and leaving the rest behind. Matthew Kirchhoff of the Wildlife Society testified in Congress that "virtually all of the logging on the Tongass to date has occurred in higher-volume, old-growth stands located along valley bottoms, rivers and low-elevation hillsides. These are far and away the most productive, and generally the most accessible sites in the forest.... They generally comprise the most important wildlife habitat as well." (balance of this article omitted here; unscannable)