The Forest For the Trees- Clear-Cuts in Alaska
If one Alaskan cruise operator has
anything to do with it, clear-cuts in
the Tongass may soon be a thing of
the past.
By David Herndon
It's said that the Tongass National Forest wears a
mantle of precipitation in modesty: on those rare
days when the sun does shine, the landscape is
simply too gorgeous. But perhaps the rainclouds are
worn in shame, too—in a vain attempt to shroud
the scars of a half-century of clear-cutting.
The clear-cuts along Alaska's Inside Passage—miles
and miles of them—testify to a decades-long war
over the Tongass, the world's largest remaining
temperate rain forest. Conservationists, including
those who support ecotourism, advocate the
preservation of this precious habitat, home to
bears, wolves, moose, deer, and bald eagles. The
timber industry and its adherents, who include the
state's disproportionately powerful Congressional
delegation, have fought hard against logging
restrictions and in favor of the subsidies upon which
the industry depends. Right now, as the market for
timber continues to decline and Washington seems
bent on changing its policies, the greens have
reason to hope that the campaign has finally
shifted in their favor.
In April, Under Secretary of Agriculture Jim Lyons
applied the final touches to a management plan
that declared prime tracts of the Tongass off-limits
to logging. The move reflected a national shift in
Forest Service priorities, away from its traditional
tree-farming agenda and toward a stewardship
based on conservation, recreation, and tourism. All
eyes are on Forest Service Chief Mike Dombeck, who
has declared a widespread moratorium on road
building in "roadless areas" of the national
forests—which basically means no new
logging—while he decides on a nationwide policy.
For now, happily for the Alaska delegation, the
Tongass is exempt from the moratorium; 2 million
of the forest's remaining 9 million roadless acres
hang in the balance.
"The Lyons plan took us a long way, but didn't solve
all the problems," says Marc Wheeler of the
Southeast Alaska Conservation Coalition. "As long
as the Alaska delegation is in place and there's a
Republican Congress, it's all still pretty fragile."
In fact, the day after the plan was announced, Alaska
senator Ted Stevens, chairman of the Senate
Appropriations Committee, vowed to gut the Forest
Service budget if the agency followed its new
agenda.
Despite the partisanship, however, the debate
about the Tongass does not break down strictly
along party lines. Michael McIntosh describes
himself as a "fiscally conservative Republican
businessman," and it annoys him that the
government subsidizes logging in the Tongass to
the tune of $30 million a year. "If I need federal
funds to underwrite my business," he says, "then I
probably shouldn't be in that business." Especially
when it harms viable businesses such as tourism.
"People aren't going to pay a lot of money to go on
a cruise and see a clear-cut."
Unless they're on one of McIntosh's own little ships.
He's behind an outfit called the Boat Company,
which consists of two World War II-era
minesweepers that have been retrofitted as luxury
craft. They hold no more than 20 guests on six- and
nine-day cruises that cost $600 per person per day.
His crews make a point of showing large clear-cuts
to the passengers, and a naturalist explains their
potentially harmful effects on the environment,
which go well beyond aesthetics. Old-growth forest
provides prime habitat for wildlife, especially deer.
In southeastern Alaska, traditional clear-cuts work
like neutron bombs in reverse: they devastate the
forest infrastructure and leave the fauna to try to
survive in the rubble. McIntosh wants his clients to
learn that when you're splintering forests that have
taken at least 250 years to grow, the ecology of the
area is devastated. "When it's gone, it's gone," he
says, "and the world is worse off." He hopes visitors
will take this message back home to their
representatives—Republican and Democrat alike.
Fittingly, it was the great Republican forefather of
conservation in America, Teddy Roosevelt, who first
designated the Tongass a national forest in the
early part of the century—and the McIntosh family's
stake in southeastern Alaska goes back nearly that
far. A subsidiary of A&P (the family grocery
business) ran the largest salmon-canning operation
in the region, and McIntosh himself worked on a
fishing boat there in the early fifties. "I fell in
love with the area," he says. In the late seventies he
decided to go into the cruise business "on a mini
basis," as a way to raise consciousness about the
need to conserve the Tongass. At first his guests
were drawn strictly from the ranks of the converted,
Nature Conservancy members and the like, but over
the years he has attracted, by word of mouth, a
well-heeled, influential clientele that he estimates
is 80 percent Republican. A newsletter and Web site
keep former passengers abreast of political
developments affecting the forest, and gently
encourage them to take an interest in one of the
conservation groups the McIntosh Foundation
supports from its $40 million endowment. ("A small
foundation," he says.)
Clearly, Michael McIntosh is not your typical
tree-hugger, any more than the Boat Company is
your typical cruise line. It must be noted that
conservation is not the focus of the line's trips. It
could easily be argued, for instance, that fine dining
is. Three outstanding meals are served daily. These
glorious events are interrupted by stops in Juneau,
Sitka, and Ketchikan, whale-watching sessions,
canoe outings, visits to villages, nature walks, and
fishing excursions—which leads us back to dinner,
where your own freshly caught halibut or salmon
might appear on your plate, grilled. As for the
boats, the 97-foot, 12-passenger Observer and the
144-foot, 20-passenger Liseron, both made entirely
of wood and detailed with mahogany brightwork,
are so distinctive that the company can't buy any
more; a third vessel, a wood-and-aluminum copy of
the Liseron, has been commissioned and will launch
next season.
"I'm a big fan of what the Boat Company is doing
here," says writer and cultural anthropologist
Richard Nelson, and he's not just talking about the
open-bar comforts of the Observer's lounge. In fact,
Nelson is much more in his element while wholly
immersed in the raw rain forest; his book The
Island Within details a year in the life of one of the
Tongass's uninhabited isles. "Because the Liseron
and the Observer are such small boats, they give
you great views," says Nelson, "but they're
unobtrusive—not a huge intrusion on the land and
water."
Tourism's impact on the character of southeast
Alaska is a hot topic. The region's 70,000 residents
host 650,000 tourists every summer—double the
number of 10 years ago. Some towns, like Juneau
and Ketchikan, have embraced the big-time cruise
lines that account for most of the visitors, while
others, like Sitka, have resisted. "We want tourism
based on quality as much as quantity," says Nelson,
who sits on the board of the Sitka Conservation
Society. "For a lot of us, the essence of the Alaska
experience is solitude." He's not the only one who
thinks so. The Forest Service is trying to figure out
how to manage access so hunters, kayakers, and
small-craft passengers will experience no more than
three daily "encounters" (loosely defined as waving
distance) with other humans.
It remains to be seen whether such an exclusive
arrangement can bring the kind of economic
sustenance needed to help offset the decline in
commercial fishing and industrial logging. But for
now, conservationists are cautiously celebrating
their recent victories. "People need to appreciate
the place for its wildness and beauty and
biodiversity, not as a source of pulp for Pampers,"
says Nelson. "The wonderful thing about tourism is
that trees become more valuable on the
mountainside than when they're cut down and
hauled away. Locals are beginning to see this."
This article appeared in the Nov, 1999 addition of Travel and Leisure
Magazine.
