Albion Monitor /Features
Tongass:
Alaska's Rainforest

Facts About Tongass National Forest

Facts About Tongass National Forest

  • Temperate rainforests only exist in a few places on earth, including the coastal regions of western North America, New Zealand, Tasmania, Patagonia and western North America. Just a century and a half ago, the Pacific Northwest coast was the largest single temperate rainforest in the world, stretching over 3,000 miles from the fog-shrouded redwood forests of California to the Sitka spruce forests of Alaska.

  • Tongass forest is on Prince of Wales Island, the fourth largest island in the U.S. comprising about 17 million acres. It is part of the thin finger of Alaska that stretches along the coast of British Columbia (see map at right).

  • It is one of the most biological diverse areas left in the United States with healthy populations of black bears, birds, wolves, moose, eagles and salmon.

  • Most of the island is rock, ice, and scrub, but about one-third (5.7 million acres) is forest.

  • Most of the land protected by Congress as Wilderness ("LUD II" wildlands and salmon stream buffers) is outside the forests.

  • Tongass is the source of much of the biggest and most valuable Alaskan timber in the region.

  • Only 241,000 acres -- about one-quarter of the most valuable old-growth -- is protected from logging.

  • 97 percent of the logged timber and pulp is shipped directly to Japan, where it is processed and exported back to the United States.

  • Ketchikan Pulp Co. (KPC), a division of Louisiana-Pacific Corp., held a contract with the Forest Service until the year 2004, guaranteeing them a long-term supply of timber from the Tongass. This contract is (apparently) cancelled by the October agreement between Murkowski and the Clinton Administration.

  • Before the October agreement, 1.7 million acres were scheduled for logging, joining the million acres clearcut since 1954.

  • To log those 1.7 million acres, environmentalists said that almost the entire forest would be crisscrossed with roads and spot clearcuts.

  • Under the agreement, KPC can still log 300,000,000 board feet of timber. It is unclear if roads needed for that logging will have the same impact on the forest.

  • Three days after the October agreement, the CEO of Louisiana-Pacific announced that the corporation was closing KPC.

  • Sixty percent of the forest is still available for commercial logging under Forest Service plans.



    • Items from the Sierra Club, The Alaska Rainforest Campaign, and Southeast Alaska Conservation Council

    All photographs © Pat Costello Photography and used by permission

    Comments? Send a letter to the editor.

    Albion Monitor Issue 20 (http://www.monitor.net/monitor)

    All Rights Reserved.

    Contact rights@monitor.net for permission to reproduce.

    Front Page