The Alaska Chainsaw Massacre

Cliff Watson stands ankle-deep in Alaskan mud, watching 25,000 pounds of massive, unpeeled logs come bounding up a steep slope. The logs, hauled by a steel cable as thick as Arnold Schwarzenegger's neck, make a sickening thunk-a thunk-a sound as they strike the now-barren land. Watson, a logging boss, looks on with an unmistakable air of macho pride as his three-man crew scrambles over the muddy hillside. They cinch lines called chokers to the felled trees, jumping back a split second before the logs are yanked up the hill by a "yarder," a ninety-foot-high tower with huge revolving drums at the base, around which the cables coil and uncoil with metallic shrieks and groans.

"The thing about a clear-cut," says Watson, shouting over the roar of the yarder's diesel engine and the pounding rain, "is that it is a 100 percent right-here-right-now visual effect."

"Clear-cut" means just what the word says. If it's a tree, it's coming down. Big or small, it makes no difference. Until a few days earlier, this mud-strewn valley of stumps was a forest of old-growth trees, unchanged for thousands of years. Now, because this is private land, the owners can do pretty much whatever they want with it, and that includes clear-cutting the forest and shipping the logs to Asia, where they're dissolved into pulp, processed and returned to America as cellophane and disposable diapers.

But to the west of the clear-cut, across the choppy waters of the Port Frederick inlet, the view is very different. There, in the Tongass National Forest, towering mountain peaks are draped in clouds and covered with ancient trees. The Tongass is by far the largest and wildest forest in America. At 17 million acres, it's as big as the entire state of West Virginia -- more than four times bigger than any national forest in the lower forty-eight. It's also the largest intact temperate rain forest left on the planet, a place that receives as much as 200 inches of rain a year. Although parts of the forest have been clear-cut in the past, much of the Tongass remains pristine, and it's one of the only places in the country that retains every species of plant and animal found in pre-Columbian times, a biological time capsule that includes grizzly bears, wolves, bald eagles and salmon.

But the Tongass -- the remnants of a primeval wilderness that once flowed in a great arc 2,500 miles long, from California north to Kodiak, Alaska -- may not exist in its present wild state for much longer. On December 23rd, President Bush reopened the Tongass to clear-cutting, exempting it from a Clinton-era provision known as the "roadless rule" that banned the building of new roads in 60 million acres of national forests. Bowing to timber interests that helped finance his campaign, Bush plans to punch 1,000 miles of new logging roads into the Tongass, giving timber companies access to remote stands of giant trees that can yield ten times as much wood per acre as the private land Cliff Watson is clear-cutting. What's more, Bush wants taxpayers to foot the bill for the roads, subsidizing the timber industry for clear-cutting the forest (see "The Log Boondoggle," Page 52). Unless the courts or Congress intervene, the wildest forest in America may soon be overrun by machines like Watson's that leave behind little more than giant stumps and shattered limbs.

When his crew is finished loading an enormous truck with fifty tons of trees, Watson follows it down a treacherous switchback road that had been gouged out of the thin soil. In an area as tangled and inaccessible as the Tongass, loggers need roads like these to reach the trees -- and that's just what Bush wants to give them. The truck passes mile after mile of rain forest that has been slashed to bare earth, but Watson is as oblivious to the carnage as he is to the incessant rain. To him, cutting logging roads into the Tongass simply means more jobs. "Loggers," he says, "are just pawns in the whole thing."

K. J. Metcalf has a broader view of how much is at stake in Bush's war on the wild. A tall, laconic man who looks at least a decade younger than his sixty-nine years, Metcalf worked for the U.S. Forest Service for twenty-four years, serving in the Tongass and rising to the post of head ranger of Admiralty Island, a reserve nearly seventy times the size of Manhattan. He worked under seven presidents, from Eisenhower to Reagan, but he says he has never seen the kind of all-out attack on wilderness being mounted by George W. Bush. "It's like he just can't wait to get in there and destroy everything," Metcalf says, settling into his seat on a small floatplane that's headed deep into the forest. As the pilot hits the ignition, Metcalf raises his voice to be heard above the propeller's howl. "And there's a lot to destroy in the Tongass."

A plane flight and a couple of boat rides later, I see what Metcalf means. We're deep in the Tongass, hiking down a path in the forest on Chichagof Island and avoiding swampy areas called muskegs, with their deep potholes of mud and gnarled trees. Before long, we enter a cathedral-like stand of Sitka spruce, the tallest tree in the Tongass, a species that can grow more than 200 feet high and live for 1,000 years. Metcalf stops in front of a huge specimen, tilts back his cap and looks up. The treetop is lost somewhere high above us in the swirling clouds of mist and rain. "This one's a good 600 years old, maybe older," he estimates.

There's something humbling about standing beneath a tree that was already a century old when Columbus set out to find a new route to India. Almost as amazing as the tree itself is the riot of life thriving on and around it. Moss, lichens, fungi and flowering plants by the dozens cover the giant tree's lower reaches, all testimony to the fact that this temperate rain forest contains a greater biomass, acre for acre, than a tropical rain forest. A huge raven calls from its perch high above, its "song" a perfect imitation of a raindrop striking a puddle. It seems like a strange sound to mimic, until Metcalf reminds me that parts of the Tongass receive five times more precipitation than Seattle. During the winter, these big trees prevent most of the snow from reaching the ground, allowing herds of Sitka black-tailed deer to browse the plants below. If the area is clear-cut, Metcalf says, "the valleys will fill up with snow in a bad year, and the deer will get trapped and starve."

As we continue hiking, piles of bear scat serve as a reminder that more than deer are threatened by Bush's planned clear-cuts. I've hiked in wild areas throughout the States, but I've never seen a place with an abundance of wildlife to compare to the Tongass. There are, for example, as many grizzly bears on a single island here as there are in the lower forty-eight states combined. Wolves, which biologists are struggling to reintroduce elsewhere, roam the Tongass as they have for millennia. In low-lying areas of the forest, water spreads out to form wetland habitat for huge flocks of migrating birds, and millions of salmon return here from the sea each summer and autumn to spawn. In some places the bald eagles are as thick as sparrows are in the cities, with as many as 3,000 congregating to feast during salmon runs.

But a clear-cut can choke a stream to death in a matter of days. Without trees and thick understory, water cascades down the hillsides and into the streams, clogging the waterway with mud and debris and blocking the salmon runs that feed the grizzlies. Bears are keystone predators, the top of the food chain. Take them out of the picture and the ecology of the Tongass will be devastated. "Clear-cutting here can do incredible damage to the watershed," Metcalf says.

Spend a few hours in the Tongass, and it's easy to imagine that there's no end to the forest. But this is one of the most durable American myths. From the moment they set foot here, European settlers mistook "vast" for "infinite" and "abundant" for "inexhaustible." I hear echoes of these myths when I speak with Mark Rey, the Bush administration's chief architect for forest policy. Rey argues that the Tongass is just too big, and the areas slated for logging too small, to do any real ecological damage. It's the same rationale the administration has used to push for oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge: What harm could extracting a few crucial resources do in such a vast and remote place?

"The management plan for the Tongass preserves ninety-five percent of it," insists Rey, undersecretary for natural resources and the environment, who has led a three-year effort to exempt the forest from Clinton's roadless rule. Building more roads through the Tongass, he notes, will open only a fraction of the forest -- around 300,000 acres -- to logging. The problem is, that fraction contains some of the oldest and biggest stands of trees in the Tongass -- the giants coveted by industrial loggers for the higher prices they fetch -- and most of them are concentrated in remote, roadless areas that provide crucial habitat for wildlife. Cutting roads deep into the forest to reach those areas, environmentalists warn, could devastate as many as 2.5 million acres.

It's easy to see why timber companies want access to the old-growth trees. A single acre of these giants can contain as much as 100,000 board feet, much of it furniture-quality wood, compared with low-volume stands that yield only one-tenth as much timber per acre, most of it of such poor quality that it has to be "pulped" -- chopped up and dissolved in chemicals to produce cheap products such as cardboard. The big trees are few and far between. Two-thirds of the Tongass consists of swampy areas, rugged alpine mountains of rock and ice, and thickets of scrubland -- all land unsuitable for logging. So to suggest, as Rey does, that the administration is protecting the forest by leaving most of it off-limits to loggers is like claiming the government is saving endangered sea turtles by banning commercial fishing on Midwestern prairies.

Rey can be charming, and he's exceptionally well-versed about the issues. He should be: Before joining the Bush administration, Rey worked for two decades as a lobbyist for the timber industry, making it easier for his clients to cut down national forests. In the past four years, Rey's old employers have given more than $11 million to Bush and other Republican candidates. International Paper contributed $2.1 million, Georgia-Pacific kicked in $863,000, Weyerhaeuser gave $666,000 and the American Forest and Paper Association donated $365,000.

Rey has done his best to repay the favor. In December 2001, only two months after taking office, he personally authorized a massive "salvage" timber sale in the Bitterroot National Forest in Montana following a fire - sidestepping the normal process, which requires approval by a local forest supervisor and provides the public forty-five days to appeal the decision. A District Court judge halted the sale and chastised Rey for his "extralegal effort to circumvent the law."

Getting around the roadless rule required some equally tricky maneuvering on Rey's part. The measure is extremely popular with an American public that wants to preserve open and wild spaces as more and more land is swallowed up by sprawl and other human activities. Under the rule, the federal government cannot build roads or permit logging, drilling or mining in national forests that haven't already been altered. Nearly 2 million citizens filed public comments supporting the rule; the Sierra Club calls it "the greatest land-protection victory in a generation." Given the measure's overwhelming popularity, the Bush administration was forced to work behind the scenes to gut it. Bush was given the opening he needed in 2001, when the state of Alaska and the Alaska Forest Association, a timber lobbying group, sued the federal government to exempt the Tongass from the roadless rule, insisting that logging would not harm the forest. Rather than go to court to defend the federal government's right to set policy in federal forests, the administration entered into closed-door negotiations to settle the suit.

The talks weren't very adversarial, given that the adversaries were all on the same side. Alaska Gov. Frank Murkowski was one of Big Timber's greatest allies during his twenty-two years in the Senate. ("Alaskans have an accountability to the rest of the world to produce timber," Murkowski once proclaimed. "We can't protect our favorite areas as long as we have this responsibility.") His chief of staff, Jim Clark, spent nearly thirty years as a lawyer for the timber industry -- much of it as lead attorney for the AFA. And on the federal government's side was none other than Mark Rey -- not just a former timber lobbyist but an old friend of Clark's who handled timber issues as a Senate staffer for Murkowski. The result was predictable. The Bush administration granted Alaska exactly what it wanted: a full exemption from the roadless rule for the Tongass.

When Clark and Murkowski conferred during the negotiations, they often huddled in an office behind two massive doors that frame the entrance to the governor's office in Juneau. The doors are seven feet high and almost as wide, made from a rich, dark wood and featuring a hand-carved scene of the vast Alaskan forest. In the detailed carving, a man clings to the top of a tree, wearing what at first glance appears to be a ceremonial headdress and holding what looks like a staff. Closer inspection reveals that the headdress is a hard hat and the staff is a chain saw. The man is a logger, preparing to take down the very first tree in an untouched landscape.

The best way to envision the damage that the new clear-cutting will cause in the Tongass is to view parts of the forest that were destroyed by the timber industry decades ago. In the 1950s, the Forest Service awarded "sweetheart" contracts to two Tongass timber companies -- Alaska Pulp and Ketchikan Pulp, a subsidiary of Louisiana Pulp -- guaranteeing them fifty years of timber at bargain-basement prices. "They were buying whole trees for the price of a Big Mac," says Buck Lindekugel of the Southeast Alaska Conservation Council, the most influential environmental group working to protect the Tongass. The deals helped to create more than 4,000 logging jobs in the area - but they also cut 5,000 miles of roads into the Tongass, drove independent mills out of business and left behind a legacy of environmental problems.

From the air, the Tongass offers immense vistas of dark spruce and lighter hemlock, punctuated by countless lakes, blue-tinged snowfields and alpine meadows. In every direction, it looks like a travel poster for Alaska. Then a clear-cut comes into view. The area resembles a battlefield, with broken trees sticking grotesquely out of soggy ravines. From higher altitudes, the individual stumps and sawed-off limbs blur together into a massive wound, the color of old bones.

Even after so many years, long-abandoned logging roads continue to divide and fragment animal populations. K.J. Metcalf points to a section of one road that is completely washed out, the soil spilling into valleys and streams. "Roads can cause as much damage as the clear-cuts themselves," he says. The Forest Service is supposed to build and maintain culverts in the Tongass to allow salmon streams to flow beneath the roads, but the agency has a $100 million backlog on road maintenance here. As a result, two-thirds of the culverts in southeast Alaska are so clogged with debris that salmon have trouble passing through them. That's one example of why exempting the Tongass from the roadless rule will devastate the forest. Sure, large pockets of trees will be left standing -- but carved up by roads, and with the ancient stands of Sitka spruce gone, the Tongass won't be able to support its abundant wildlife. The old-growth forest will become just another tree farm. It's like stripping a car -- selling off the engine, a couple of wheels, a door, some spark plugs -- and insisting it's still an automobile.

The real issue in the fight over the Tongass is the precedent it sets for other national forests. As Lindekugel points out, "If they can do this here, to the jewel in the crown of the national forest system, where can't they get away with it?" The backroom deal to reopen the Tongass to logging sent a clear message to other governors: Ask and ye shall receive. Six other states have already challenged the roadless rule in court, and the Bush administration has indicated it will simply give them what they want and allow them to ignore the rule. The administration is also busy weakening regulations that protect 191 million acres of national forests from big timber companies, and it has removed another 250 million acres of public lands from consideration for wilderness status, auctioning off drilling rights on land that the government has already determined deserves to be protected from development. And Sen. Ted Stevens, a Republican from Alaska, did his part to help the administration's timber allies, using his position as head of the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee to make it extremely difficult to challenge Tongass timber sales in court.

K. J. Metcalf doesn't get worked up easily. In true Western fashion, he rarely speaks unless something needs saying. Even so, he seems particularly quiet as he climbs aboard the fishing boat that brought us to the Tongass. In silence, he watches a pod of a dozen humpback whales feeding on schools of herring. He turns his attention to the tall trees that line the inlet and cover the steep mountainside, a mixture of Sitka spruce, hemlock and yellow cedar that have stood for centuries but may soon be gone forever. When Metcalf finally speaks, he nods toward the hills, indicating that he's thinking not just about the trees but also about the whole of what makes this place irreplaceable: the bald eagle riding a thermal overhead, the whales that punctuate the stillness with periodic blasts from their blowholes, the grizzlies ambling in the forest, adding to their fat reserves as they prepare for their long winter hibernation.

"We have to win every time or it's gone," Metcalf says. "It's gone forever."

He pauses, watching as the wildest forest in America glides by. "They only have to win once."

(January 14, 2004)