I stepped onto the small ferry that would take me from the cruise ship to Sitka. There I would meet our bird watching excursion leader. My wife and I had taken our younger daughter’s advice and took a cruise up to Alaska while we could still get around and while she could take care of our cats. I had mixed feelings about using a cruise ship, but it was the only way we could easily get to Glacier Bay and visit several other stops along the way. I had signed into a bird watching excursion into the Tongass National Forest for both of us, but at the last minute my wife decided that she would stay on the ship and so I disembarked alone, only to find that only two other people had shown up in addition to our guide. My visit to the forest was only a few hours so my impressions are pretty superficial, but I did find the place to be enchanting and really oppose any changes in its status.
The Tongass is a treasure and has been recognized as such for years. A land of temperate rain forest, with often over 100 inches of precipitation a year, it is, at 16.7 million acres, the largest of the National Forests administered by the U. S. Department of Agriculture. The amount of CO2 sequestered by this huge forest is enormous and totals 7.7 % of all that sequestered by all US forests, by U.S. Government figures (www.fs.fed.us/.... ) The forest contains the largest stand of old growth trees in North America (www.seacc.org/...).Yet the current administration is bent on logging the old growth for short-term profit (thinkprogress.org/...). To do this is a crime which may be larger, but is comparable to the probable destruction of the salmon fisheries of Bristol Bay by the proposed Pebble Mine and a similar destruction of Columbia River salmon runs by a proposed mine in Canada. It seems that many Republicans (and some Republican-like Canadians) hate the natural world and see no purpose in the carbon sequestering and oxygen producing functions of such forests, let alone their function as centers for wildlife! I have gotten to the point where I doubt that such people can look at a forest or any other wild area and see anything but a money-making opportunity. It is a clash of values where they see us as environmental extremists and we see them as despoilers and grifters, with no in between. However, time is running out and unless we are willing to live in a dystopian world, where only the rich have the right to survive (for a while at least) and there are no wild areas left except for those too extreme in temperature or land structure to exploit, we need to reassert the values that really make America great, if flawed (like everybody else), as a leader of the free world and an innovator in conservation. Our lives now depend on our response to the growing climate crisis that threatens to overwhelm civilization. The Tongass is one of many areas that we should leave alone, although climate change may eventually alter it and other wild areas beyond recognition unless humanity is able to mount a collective effort like a worldwide Manhattan Project. Humanity has been warned, first in 1994 and then again last year. See: www.sciencealert.com/...
Below are photographs from my very short trip to one small area of the forest. I can only give the reader a very superficial view of the great biological riches to be lost if the government’s program of logging is implemented.