Tongass

Set in Alaska's coastal rain forest, Tongass is a story by turns dismaying and inspiring, of greed, courage, bare-knuckles politics, and the fate of a remote, wild, beautiful land. After World War II, the U.S. government lured two pulp companies to Southeast Alaska by promising them low-cost timber from the Tongass National Forest, the planet's largest coastal temperate rain forest. The mills bought jobs and growth to a sparsly settled region. They also wreaked ecological havoc and created a timber industry that broke labor unions, drove competitors out of business, and controlled politicians and the U.S. Forest Service. It took a national compaign, led by grassroots environmentalists, to bring sanity an sustainability to management of the Tongass. In her insighful account of Alaska's era of pulp, award-winning jounalist Kathie Durbin draws on the voices of the people most affected: independent loggers who fought back when the pulp companies conspired to drive them out of business; courageous biologists who warned that logging was destroying critical fish and wildlife habital; Tlingit Indians who saw their traditional hunting grounds vanish; young activists and lawyers who found their lives trasformed by the battle for the Alaska rain forest. In this new edition, Durbin updates the story of the Tongass with a chapter describing political and economic development since 1999. Among the changes; a dramatic growth in cruise ship toursim, a new governor's plan for a system of roads and bridges to link remote Southeast Alaska communities, and a renewed push by the Forest Service under a timber-friendly administration in Washington, D.C., to open vast roadless areas to logging. Yet the fightfor the Alaska rain forest is becoming a broader movement as appreciation for the true value of the regions's wilderness grows.