Tongass, Second Edition: Pulp Politics and the Fight for the Alaska Rain Forest

The largest temperate rainforest on the planet and home to grizzly bears, deer, moose, salmon, eagles, and myriad Native American tribes, the Tongass once covered southeast Alaska like a vibrant green carpet. That carpet has seen better days. In the 1950s, with sweetheart deals that provided seemingly limitless volumes of timber at well below market cost, the U.S. government enticed two pulp companies to set up shop there. The federal legislation opened up the country's largest national forest to massive industrial clear-cutting; it also set the stage for a bare-knuckles environmental battle that would reach its apex near the end of the century and become a template for future skirmishes.

A former environmental journalist for the Portland Oregonian, Durbin tells the story of the Tongass with a crime reporter's eye for deadly facts--which will fascinate anyone with an interest in the subject, particularly Alaskans and environmentalists. She details the collusion between the two pulp mills to keep prices down and small loggers squeezed; the illegal pollutant dumping; the union-busting; the U.S. Forest Service's bureaucratic myopia; the thousands of miles of logging roads punched through formerly pristine watersheds; and the destruction of once-prolific salmon streams and big-game habitat in a region renowned for its hunting and fishing. Durbin is at her best, though, unraveling the complex political processes behind the timber wars, both at the national level and the local, as well as exposing the backroom dealmaking that goes on between elected officials, corporate leaders, and activists. Perhaps most compelling is the subplot of coalition-building among fledgling enviro groups that spans decades, especially the progress of the Southeast Alaska Conservation Council (SEACC), founded in Juneau in the late '60s. Beginning as a tiny assortment of part-time, longhaired activists with nary a cent, SEACC eventually sends its own lobbyists to Washington. By the late 1980s, due largely to SEACC's tireless work, a New York Times editorial is calling the federally subsidized logging on the Tongass "so wrongheaded it's likely to provoke profanity from any fair-minded person," and Sports Illustrated is covering the story with an article entitled "Forest Service Follies." Through all this the author's sympathies are clear: significant portions of the Tongass, once a magnificent, sprawling ancient forest of spruce and hemlock, have been largely reduced to newspaper pulp--and, incredibly, at a loss to U.S. taxpayers. --Langdon Cook