Customer Reviews

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

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As relative newcomer to Southeast Alaska (1998), I have found it difficult to obtain unbiased views regarding regional resource management. This excellent bit of history by Durbin tells a very important story about this incredible national resource and the people who have shaped it, for better or worse. Many of the people mentioned are neighbors and acquaintances who have played important roles in shaping the newer policies affecting the Tongass. I now have a much greater appreciation and respect for those who took real risks and fought hard to improve timber practices on the Tongass, which is more than I can say for our state's congressional delegation. Durbin has done a real service to those of us trying to better understand the complexities of the various governmental agencies, corporations(including Native corporations), environmental groups, and private citizens that intertwine to determine whether resources are to be managed in a truly sustainable fashion in this spectacular place.

Kathie Durbin reveals the irresponsible and corrupt practices of the U.S. government, the Forest Service, and the pulp mills it was in bed with in Southeast Alaska, and how their destructive logging practices politicized a whole contingent of people to stop the decimation of our last temperate rainforest. Read "Tongass" and your blood will boil over what happened there, and what is still happening in many of our other forests today.

Journalist Kathie Durbin has written one of the finest investigative works that I have read. I'm a lawyer with biology and chemistry degrees and I find the extensive endnotes, legal references and her penchant to seek out and cite primary sources refreshing.

There is nothing here that supports any label of the author, save that of professional. This work has disturbed me for years. I have become more active in the fight to preserve the ONLY temperate rain forest left in North America because of her clear and concise use of well-supported facts.

The most disturbing fact not in the book is that the lumber industry is now nothing but a byproduct of the pulp industry.

Ms. Durbin shows us how Salmon spawning grounds destroyed out of greed and carelessness by logging right up to the spawning streams and destroying the shade that the Salmon's Redd's require, and by the disposal of low pH waste into bays and estuaries and by the effects of runoff from clearcuts (damaging sub-arctic land and water: a fragile environment, indeed).

There is no room to debate the facts...only the policy. Calling this work or its author names simply illustrates the old adage: if you can't win on the facts attack the fact-finder.

Read this book. ANWAR may be the cause celeb today, but the damage to the Tongass is going on NOW.

This is a thoroughly interesting, and meticulously researched book. The people who were affected by unsustainable logging in the Tongass through the 20th century, such as small logging companies, residents of southeast Alaska, and the Native Tlinget people come to life in these pages through many interviews.

It's not just recently scientists and people who care about the environment have talked against clearing rain forests. How could one not be moved by those seemingly endless stretches of trees in the southern tropical countries of Brazil and Malaysia? After all, they're home to tons of plants, bugs, birds and animals, along with some native peoples.

What's recent is the attention to another kind of rain forest, called the coastal temperate. It's a rain forest that needs cool summers. It also needs a total rainfall each year of more than 55 inches. This kind of rain forest used to be found on the west sides of continents. Only Africa and Antarctica never had them. Ireland and Scotland used to be famous for them. Norway still has them in pockets. There's also quite a bit along Chile, New Zealand, and Tasmania. But the greatest of them all runs from Kodiak Island in the Alaska gulf south, through the Alaska panhandle and Canada's British Columbia coast to Vancouver Island.

Alaska's rain forests are a breathtaking sight. They're also good for the world. They build up and store more organic material than any other forest on earth. Some of that material drops into the nearby ocean. That's why Alaska's waters are full of the most scrumptious shellfish, salmon and halibut around.

And yet for over 40 years some of those forests were logged quickly and uncontrollably. Other forests were likewise logged some 20 years later. Salmon-spawning streams and black-tailed deer homes were ruined. Poorly built logging roads brought about landslides and brought in poachers. Caves underneath the trees were an archaeologist's treasure chest. But cutting down the trees caved in caverns and buried a part of our world history.

By the end of the 20th century, almost 1 million acres worth of trees were gone. It wasn't just muskeg, conifer and alpine scrub. It was western red cedar, western hemlock, Sitka spruce, and Alaska yellow cedar. The sad thing's no matter the tree, it was turned into pulp or 2-by-4's. That meant a lot of big, old, strong, tall trees cut down to make low-priced wood products that could have been made from lower-quality wood from elsewhere. Fewer trees could have been cut down and more money could have been made if the goal'd instead been turning out custom and specialty wood products for higher prices.

Pressure from nature supporters, native peoples and area residents put an end to TONGASS PULP POLITICS AND THE FIGHT FOR THE ALASKA RAIN FOREST might be won in the 21st century. Adventure packages, cruise ships, food production, handcrafts, small-scale custom and specialty logging, and tourist accommodations keep people employed and communities afloat. Forest service workers are cleaning up streams, redoing bad roads, and watching second-growth trees. So for the time being, there's more respect to what Virignia Tech master gardeners call the wildlands-urban interface of where people and nature meet.

Author Kathie Durbin's book is well-organized. It has clear examples and telling photos. It ends with a good bibliography and index. It's aimed at nature-supporting and community-building readers.

This book tells the truth. It isn't some biased interpretation of events, but rather a compilation of facts strung together into a very readable narrative. I live here too and ask at what cost should the mills be protected? Apparently Forest Cole thinks at a high one with the Logjam sale. His entire justification is keeping the mills going. The Tongass has more user groups than one and all others are asked to suffer for well over 100 years for this one. It's time to place a correct valuation on this resource and stop subsidizing it's managed destruction.

If you want a purely capitalistic argument, let's price the trees here 1 tree, 1 price to any user (leave it standing or cut it) and see what becomes of them. I bet not many would get cut that way as the true economic cost is too high in most cases without corrupt subsidization.

As a 50 year resident of Ketchikan, I was curious how a "tree hugger" would portray the fight for the Tongass--known in these parts as the fight for a reasonable standard of living. Ms. Durbin quotes environmental organizer Donald Ross on page 172: "It doesn't take much, when you're a congressman from Kansas and you've never heard of the Tongass, to get you to vote for trees." When all is said and done, that was the tactic of the environmentalists. On page 246, she says, "Most who did [find job after the Sitka mill closed] were forced to make do with a lower standard of living than they had become accustomed to on pulp mill wages." How easily she dismisses the plight of those who live in the Tongass. There's a lot Ms. Durbin doesn't mention like the fact that only the wealthy and refugees from the 60's can afford to experience up close & personal the pristine beauty of the nation's First Park. The environmentalists have won. Sierra Club, kiss my ax!

I have lived in the Tongass,, The Tongass is being sold out to the tour package industry,, this industry is no different than any other. The people who live here through its most harsh winters are being dictated to by feel good (my Disney Land) visitors. Many wonderful Alaskan familys have been displaced because of this myth.