In The Northwest: A furious effort for logging roads in the Tongass

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Monday, June 21, 2004

In The Northwest: A furious effort for logging roads in the Tongass

By JOEL CONNELLY
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER COLUMNIST

TENAKEE SPRINGS, Alaska -- J.C. Wisenbaugh once made a living cutting forests along Tenakee Inlet of Chichagof Island. Nowadays, he looks across the fjord and tells how more cuts would disrupt the lifestyle of this isolated Southeast Alaska town.

"They've proposed building a road into a watershed important to a lot of us: It is where we hunt and fish," said Wisenbaugh, sitting on the deck of a trademark Tenakee Springs house built on pilings out over the water.

"It's an easy place to park a skiff. In from the beach, it opens into meadows," he explained. "You can see a distance. It's ideal for hunting ducks."

Fishing guide Tuck Harry took us across later that day. Porpoises escorted us into a little bay. A distant brown lump turned out to be an Alaska brown bear munching sedges. He will be scooping salmon in a few short weeks.

Unbeknownst to visitors, or its hundred or so individualistic residents, Tenakee Springs was coming up a big winner that afternoon, 3,000 miles away on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Congress' lower chamber voted 222-205 to prohibit use of federal money to build any new timber roads in Southeast Alaska's 16.7-million-acre Tongass National Forest.

If the vote withstands furious efforts by Alaska's congressional delegation to overturn it, one of the logging projects blocked would be the Finger Mountain timber sale across from Tenakee Springs.

Logging in America's largest national forest -- the Tongass is the size of West Virginia -- has required huge subsidies by America's taxpayers.

In 2003, the U.S. Forest Service spent $36 million on its timber sales program and received back just $1.2 million from timber companies.

"The 'independent Alaskan' is a myth: We have the biggest handout economy you ever saw," said Roger Lewis, who sold his Juneau gift shop and retired to Tenakee Springs.

The subsidies used to be larger. The federal government virtually gave away Tongass timber after World War II in order to persuade the timber industry to open pulp mills in Ketchikan and Sitka. Uncle Sam signed 50-year agreements that provided mill operators with 13.5 billion board feet of timber.

In the late 1980s, more than 400 million board feet of timber was cut annually in the Tongass. Hemlock from Tenakee Inlet supplied the Sitka mill; the mill's owner used middlemen to sell "incidental" timber such as prized yellow cedar to Japan.

"No matter what the companies wanted, the Forest Service had to acquiesce," said K.J. Metcalf, who spent 24 years with the Forest Service and was the first manager of Admiralty Island National Monument.

The big mills closed in the 1990s: The Clinton administration later included the Tongass in its "roadless rule," forbidding construction of new logging roads on 58.3 million acres of unroaded national forest land. The Tongass timber cut fell to 50 million board feet in 2003.

The Bush administration and Alaska's GOP Gov. Frank Murkowski have relentlessly pushed to get the chain saws running again.

One of the nation's premier old-boy networks swung into action to make it happen. The state of Alaska and the Alaska Forest Association sued the federal government to exempt the Tongass from the roadless rule.

Opting for a "settlement" of the suit, the Bushies deployed Undersecretary of Agriculture Mark Rey, a former timber lobbyist who worked for Murkowski in the U.S. Senate. The state's chief negotiator was Jim Clark, the governor's chief-of-staff and former lawyer for the Alaska Pulp Co.

The result was to "temporarily exempt" the Tongass from the rule, opening up 330,000 acres of old-growth rain forest to logging -- and perhaps 1.5 million acres to impacts from logging roads.

The exemption, announced in December, was hailed by Murkowski as "a vital step in our plan to rebuild the Southeast timber industry."

Murkowski has taken other steps, such as axing the habitat division of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. Its biologists had a reputation for pointing out where timber sales intruded into critical wildlife winter range, and logging outside timber sale boundaries.

Until last week's House vote, the Forest Service was hoping to get timber sales back up to 150 million board feet of timber each year.

The House vote should cause a lot of Americans -- hunters, conservationists, fiscal conservatives -- to ask a simple question: Why?

Why build logging roads into places like the animal- and salmon-rich Cleveland Peninsula near Ketchikan and estuaries of Upper Tenakee Inlet on Chichagof Island?

The Tongass has the same complex of mammals still in place (e.g. grizzly bears, wolves) that national forests in the lower 48 are struggling to restore.

Why should the federal government spend $150,000 a mile on logging roads that generate relatively few jobs?

Southeast Alaska still has three moderate-size sawmills, which bask in government generosity. The Forest Service allows mill operators to cancel money- losing contracts.

At the north end of Chichagof Island, a logging company cut down hundreds of trees: The timber sale was a money-loser. Aided by Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, the logger was able to pull out of the sale. The timber was left to rot on the ground.

Tenakee Springs is a town with little use for waste. Its residents scramble to make a living and subsist off nature's bounty. They put out crab pots, fish for salmon and halibut, make wines from wild berries and cook with an intertidal plant called the goose tongue.

"People ask me, 'What do you do with all your time?' I don't have any," joked Gordon Chew, a builder and transplant from Sonoma, Calif.

Villagers just want to see bays and river valleys across Tenakee Inlet -- several of which already show clearcuts -- left alone as natural generators of life.

Granting their wish saves dollars and makes sense.

P-I columnist Joel Connelly will be writing more columns based on a recent trip to Alaska. He can be reached at 206-448-8160 or joelconnelly@seattlepi.com

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