July 30, 2013
Tuesday PM

As always in Southeast Alaska, it is pouring rain when we hop into our bright orange dinghy. We're two days into a nine-day circumnavigation of Baranof Island, and the yacht that I share with four other Forest Service rangers has anchored overnight in Red Bluff Bay – so named for the sheer, reddish-brown cliffs of its northeast ridge.

We've come to inspect sites that are of interest to the Forest Service. Today, we're visiting the remains of a salmon cannery that burned down in the 1950s, a rumored grave site, and then walking a possible group trail to the top of the cliffs lining the bay.

After sixty years, no trace of the cannery's wooden components remains. We find only several wide rusted pipes embedded at odd angles in the ground, along with other bits of machinery strewn on the rocks. The archeologist takes pictures, and the rest of the team pokes around the site. I shoot a few photographs, but mostly I stay in the dinghy with our yacht's skipper, Bob. We talk about the coastal landscape, how it becomes increasingly extreme as you travel northward.

Immersed in this tableau, it is easy to forget there is another world beyond Alaska – one which sees the forest not as a biome, but as a farm. I see traces in the remnants of human presence, unsettling reminders that people once overstepped in their attempts to tame the forest. But those traces always seem antiquated enough to fool me into thinking they are far removed from our current reality.

In the coming days, I will learn just how wrong I am: that exploitation of the forest is alive and well in Alaska. But for now, I am blissfully unaware of just how close the two worlds are to colliding, and the ruins are no more than a reminder of the power of nature to reclaim its rightful place.

After a brief stop at the gravestone – which turns out to be an amateur papier-maché construction – we boat to the start of the hike. We soon discover that the trail isn't a trail at all – in fact, there is no trail. The terrain rises steeply from the water, and we're immediately bushwhacking through a lattice of branches while clambering over waist-height, mossy logs interspersed with gnarly roots. We decide to call it a mountainside scrabble rather than a hike.

After a while, we break through the treeline. The massive old-growth trunks fall away and we're facing steep stone mounds, surrounded by grasses and the occasional stunted tree. The foliage is no longer protecting us from the rain and I'm soon very grateful for my hardhat, gloves, and rain gear. I'm using hands, feet, and occasionally a butterfly net to gain purchase. Several times I think we've made it to the top of the highest ridge, only to discover that there's another one beyond it. Despite the recurring anticlimaxes, I feel fresh. The rocks are slick with rain, but I manage to stay upright. Must be the butterfly net.

When we do level off, we find ourselves surrounded by grey stone mounds, mosses, grasses, rainwater pools, and stunted trees. This is muskeg, an acidic and mostly infertile bog that supports only the barest of life. A 400-year-old tree here may grow no taller than one foot, its trunk twisted and kinked, barely two inches in diameter. The rainforest is dominated by Alaskan yellow-cedar, Sitka spruce, and western hemlock, but in muskeg the only species that can take hold is usually lodgepole pine.

We clamber around on the rocks for a while, coming across several progressively larger rain pools. Our botanist finds a cluster of rare orchids and takes pictures and a GPS waypoint. Over lunch, the wilderness ranger decides that this landscape is too precious – and the terrain too dangerous – to be opened up to the trampling feet of frequent group tours. We sit in silence, listening to the quiet rustle of raindrops, enveloped by clouds that draw a blanket of silence over the ridge.

Although I'm from Vancouver, one of the wettest places in North America, I always stayed indoors when it rained. Even gearing up this morning, I'd wished it were sunny so we could see the landscape in all its glory. But now, perched on a rock, watching evergreen needles flutter lightly as drops fall on them, I feel immensely lucky to be seeing this place in its natural state. This is a rainforest, after all.

After lunch, we keep exploring. Making my way through a narrow crevice formed by two large rocks, I drop down into a little gully, and stop sharply.

I'm still in muskeg, but it's much lusher. The gully teems with plants, and the pines are subordinate to spruce, cedar, and hemlock. Although the trees here are still stunted, they're much taller than the ones on the other side of the rocks. Some even reach above my head. Mosses carpet the ground, and the foliage of smaller trees cascade over one another like a waterfall. Everything is green, so green that it almost glows.

Up the gully, a single tree is silhouetted, standing tall as everything else fades into the fog. A spruce has managed to establish a secure foothold on a knoll, somehow outcompeting everything else, now literally king of the hill. It stands resolute, in defiance of the poor soils and harsh conditions, its only concession its form, its branches forced to congregate on the downhill side. The shape of the gully is perfect for channeling wind from higher elevations, and the breeze inside is noticeably stronger than outside. Decades of one-directional winds have forced it to reconfigure in order to survive.

The fog mutes everything, except for the gently rustling branches and ever-present raindrops. I can't help standing there for a couple of minutes, feeling honored to be in the presence of this slightly mystical tree. Finally, I make my way on up the gully, reaching out to brush my fingers on the tree's needles as I pass. I find myself struck with a mild sense of guilt for having disturbed it.

We head back to the water shortly afterward, descending in another scramble, this time down the red bluffs themselves. At the bottom, we end up in a small glade, surrounded by slightly crooked trees and a few old, sharply leaning dead logs. Our botanist calls it the primeval forest, and, snapping another picture, I realize just how true that is. This area is a designated wilderness, meaning that it has likely never been touched by loggers. The trees before us may be centuries old, but the ecosystem itself has been here for millennia.

Later, curled up with a hot chocolate, cabin windows shielding me from the rain as we motor southward on gently rolling seas, I think again about the spruce. I have touched its life briefly, but it was there long before I found it today. Barring any major disturbances, it will remain there, silently asserting its place in the mist, for centuries to come.

Months later, when I find myself back in New Haven, nearly as far removed from the Alaskan rainforest as I can be within the United States. I often find myself thinking of that gully. Alaska is still in my head, and I can't yet face the rush of the East Coast's big cities. I don't know if I'll ever retrace my steps or find that tree again. I do have the GPS waypoints, so perhaps I'll make it back there someday. In the meantime, my gloves still smell of yellow-cedar.

My spruce is lucky: it lives in a wilderness, protected from development. Many others are not so fortunate: decades of old-growth clearcutting have left a patchwork on many islands. Thankfully, forests grow back. But conditions today are very different than they were a thousand years ago, and nobody knows how long it will take for this forest to regain its structure – or if it ever will. The massive, 800-year-old trunks that anchor the forest and nourish its next generation do not simply – pardon the pun – grow on trees.

In fact, these trees were always few and far between, and never made up more than 6 percent of the Tongass. Today, they make up only 3 percent, barely any of it protected. On top of that, the 'very large tree' stands – those with the largest of the large trees – only make up one-half of one percent of the forest, or about 81,770 square acres. These are the trees that are most valuable ecologically – and commercially. They have been overharvested for decades, and at least half have been lost since 1950. On the timescale of our lifetimes, large trees are basically a nonrenewable resource.

The Forest Service has come around in the past years, ending logging entirely in some areas and trying to transition to second-growth logging in others. But as locals will know, the largest potential impact to the forest today comes from the logging operations of certain native corporations – Sealaska in particular.

Sealaska is the only corporation that has not completed its land claims. It has known for years that it would eventually run out of old-growth forest to cut, and thus is trying, through Senate bill S.340 – now being considered by the full Senate – to redefine ANCSA's selection boundaries to include previously off-limits areas.

Sealaska is legally, morally, and ethically entitled to complete its land claims. However, under S.340 selections, a significant portion of the 70,000 acres to be conveyed would be taken from public lands outside of the legal selection boundaries, and would include some taxpayer-funded infrastructure.

More to the point, about 30 percent of Sealaska's new selections are 'large tree' stands. That is five times more than their in-boundary ANCSA selections, and ten times more than the distribution in the Tongass as a whole. Many small forest parcels would become inholdings within the national forest, and would likely be clearcut.

One may think that 70,000 acres isn't much, compared to the Tongass's 17 million acres. But it's quality, not quantity, that's the concern here. Fully one-third of the Tongass isn't forest at all: it's bare rock, ice, tundra, muskeg, or other terrain not conducive to forest growth. Yes, there are 5.6 million acres of designated wilderness, but these are often low resource value areas. And much of the Tongass has already been cut.

What's even more worrisome is the dangerous precedent being set here. No other entity, public or private, is allowed to redefine its selection boundaries. What's to stop Sealaska from doing it again in twenty years when it has clearcut the rest of its land – and what's to stop another corporation, company, or entity from doing the same thing?

The moral dimensions of a situation like this one aren't easy to define. On one side is ecological integrity; on the other, the ethical concerns of native rights. I'm not immune to the argument that we have taken so much from the first peoples of this continent that it's not our place to oppose them now.

But it's also reasonable to ask whether conservation versus native rights is really the debate here. Is development really the ethical choice if that development relies on for-profit destruction of a natural resource?

Even if we made that choice in the interest of providing some jobs and income to those supported by Sealaska, what happens when they run out of forest? Will they try and repeat this a decade down the road, and then again a decade later? Either way, prime forest is a finite resource, and they will eventually face the same questions as if they stopped now. The only question is whether there will be anything left. A line has to be drawn somewhere.

The Tongass is often called the crown jewel of the U.S. National Forests, but it's more than that. It's part of the ecological endowment of this planet, and though it may lie within U.S. borders, it 'belongs' – as much as nature can belong to anything – to all creatures, including all of humanity. Nature doesn't care about political boundaries, nor does it care what happened in the past.

Why should we care? As residents of this planet, this is our forest, our ecological heritage, our charge for safekeeping. Conditions in the Tongass can be harsh, and it takes a certain kind of fortitude to survive here. But that makes it all the more special. Whether or not we live in these forests, we have a moral stake in their survival

Naazia Ebrahim
New Haven, Connecticut

About: Master of Environmental Management 2012
Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies
"I spent half my summer in the Tongass last year, and despite being from the Pacific Northwest, it really left an impression. "

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