Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
creasingly scarce and uneconomical to harvest, and as local communities realize they
stand to gain little from business as usual, a collective interest in alternative ways of
managing forest resources is taking place. This collective interest is catalyzing a more
holistic ecosystem management paradigm. In this case study, I describe the social, po-
litical, and ecological conditions that are making restoration the zone of agreement
among various stakeholders in southeast Alaska, highlight some of the challenges with
transitioning to restoration, and recommend strategies for capitalizing on emerging
opportunities.
Background
The Tongass lies at the northern end of the coastal temperate rainforest that stretches
from northern California up along the coast of British Columbia into Alaska. An ar-
chipelago with more than one thousand islands, the Tongass is an international icon
and home to five species of salmon, black and brown bears, wolves, whales, and rare
birds. Although commonly associated with rainforest characteristics, including tower-
ing Sitka spruce (
Picea stichensis
) trees, dense vegetation, heavy rainfall, and biologi-
cal richness, less than 4 percent of the Tongass actually contains the large, old-growth
trees such descriptions often conjure (Schoen and Dovichin 2007). Both environ-
mentalists and the timber industry use this statistic to rally support for their position—
either to call attention to the rarity of the resource or to claim only a fraction of the
Tongass is truly affected by timber harvest. The Tongass also contains diverse habitats,
including glaciers, rock, muskegs, estuaries, and forests of smaller, less commercially
valuable old-growth trees.
Southeast Alaska is largely under federal management, either as a national forest or
as a national park; only about 11 percent of the region is state or private land (Albert
and Schoen 2007). Extensive federal land ownership plays an important role in the
identity of local communities and the management of forest resources.
Resource Management
The recent history of the Tongass is intertwined with timber harvesting. Since the ad-
vent of Russian settlement in the late nineteenth century, natural resource manage-
ment decisions focused on removing big trees. After the Tongass was established as a
national forest in 1907, the U.S. Forest Service focused heavily on providing old-
growth timber for potential pulp mills, but it wasn't until the 1947 Tongass Timber
Act and the development of two long-term, fifty-year contracts, that large-scale har-
vesting began in earnest (Nie 2006; Sisk 2007). The guaranteed supply and accompa-
nying subsidies provided by the long-term contracts were critical to overcoming the
forest's inherent disadvantages (e.g., long distance from markets, challenging terrain
for logging and transportation, and lower-value trees)—disadvantages that originally
stymied large-scale harvest, investment, and local economic development (Morton,
Phillips, and Gore 2007; Sisk 2007).
