Tongass: The Never-Ending Tragedy

"I saw an element of good faith that I haven't seen before." When Senator Ted Stevens says that about Bill Clinton and Al Gore, you just know something bad is in the works. It is. The Alaska congressional delegation has just signed a pact with the Clinton Administration to once again boost logging levels on the nation's biggest swath of temperate rainforest: the Tongass National Forest in southeast Alaska.

Under the terms of an agreement reached between Stevens and White House Chief of Staff John Podesta, the administration has agreed to supply a three-year supply of cheap timber to a veneer mill owned by Gateway Forest Products, a new company started by executives from timber giant Louisiana Pacific. The deal assures Gateway of getting 400 million board feet of timber over the next three years.

This is a much higher rate of logging than forest biologists say the Tongass can withstand. Two years ago federal biologists said that several species in the Tongass, including the Queen Charlotte's goshawk, the Alexander Archipelago wolf, and the marbled murrelet, were in trouble due to rampant logging and road building. Southeast Alaska's salmon runs, once thought inexhaustible, were also considered vulnerable. These biologists recommended that logging be kept to no more than 75 million board feet per year, roughly half what will be permitted under the Stevens/Podesta deal. Most recently, a report by the Pacific Northwest Research Station, a branch of the Forest Service, said that logging on the Tongass' fragile karst soils (karst is a limestone formation typified by sinkholes, underground rivers, and caves) has seriously damaged soil depth and fertility.

"Each time we've had meetings like this that we thought would mean peace in the valley, as we call it, other elements have disrupted that peace," Stevens told the Anchorage Daily News. "We don't know how this is going to be accepted by others outside of government and outside of industry."

There doesn't seem to be much danger of environmentalists rocking the boat. The Tongass, once the darling of the national environmental groups who spent millions back in the 1980s touting its irreplaceable virtues, has been nearly forgotten in Clinton time. Yet, it remains the last workhorse of big timber. Oh, yes, there was a flurry of attention a few years ago when the administration canceled the long term contracts of the two pulp mills in Sitka and Ketchikan. But that was after the market for pulp had plunged and the mills had shut down.

The big money on the Tongass is in the high-end old-growth meant for veneer mills and sawmills, particularly cedar. Of course, the big trees of the Tongass were always the attraction to the dominant players in Alaska, namely the Ketchikan Pulp Company, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Louisiana-Pacific. The pulp mill never made much money, even with a $40 million per year subsidy from the federal treasury. But the contracts also guaranteed LP exclusive rights to Tongass timber at ridiculously low prices, including highly valued Alaskan cedar. Japanese timber merchants, who prize cedar for use in building tea-houses and other ceremonial buildings, are willing to pay upwards of $1,500 per thousand board feet. LP often pays the Forest Service less than $2 per thousand board feet for the same trees.

Sorry economics of Tongass timber sales haven't changed under the Clinton Administration. A recent report by the General Accounting Office says that from the end of 1992 through 1994, the Tongass National Forest lost more then $102 million on its timber sale program. The loss was more than $3,270 per acre cut--an astounding figure. For the next three years, the pace of the logging decreased (mainly because of depressed pulp prices) but the losses mounted. From 1995 to 1998, the Tongass lost nearly $70 million, or $5,010 per acre.

This timber is not providing many jobs in Alaska. That's because since 1993 more than 80 percent of the timber cut from the Tongass has been shipped as raw logs to Japan, Korea, and China. But the price to sustain the few jobs generated by it is enormous. In 1997, the federal taxpayer shelled out $28,673 for each job produced by Tongass logging. Of course, this is far less than these loggers and millworkers actually made. The difference ends up in the corporate coffers of Louisiana Pacific. Since 1983, the total subsidy to LP and the other beneficiaries of Tongass timber amounts to more than $800 million.

Even with these subsidies LP was having a hard time in Alaska and planned to shut down its operations there entirely by next year, leaving more than 100 million board feet of timber (about 5,000 acres) currently under contract uncut. That's when Stevens, the head of the Senate Appropriations committee, went to work. More than $40 million was shoveled to local communities as "relief" money and LP executives were induced with lavish federal and local pay-outs to form a new company (i.e., Gateway) to continue LP's operations. More than $10 million of the relief funds went to Gateway, not the laid off workers it was supposedly earmarked for. The next problem was securing enough timber to keep the veneer mill in operation. That's where Podesta came to the rescue.

The most recent deal has been in the works for months. It was quietly sealed on the same day Al Gore climbed Mount Rainier with his son, Albert the III. The timing, no doubt, is so that Gore's fingerprints wouldn't be traceable. Not that it matters much. It's hard to see the enviro crowd in Washington or Anchorage holding Gore accountable, anyway.

And, in fact, there's been barely a peep of protest from the lavishly-funded Alaska Rainforest Coalition since the deal came down. No full page ads in the New York Times. No calls for Gore to denounce the deal. There's some cautious discussion of a lawsuit. But even that is narrowly drawn and, if filed, would only affect about a third of the land slated for clearcutting.

There's plenty of backroom talk about what Stevens gave away for this gift. It doesn't add up to much. Apparently, he promised not to push through any more legislative riders exempting Tongass timber sale planners from environmental laws this year. He also apparently pledged not to move to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling in the next Congress. Again this is hardly much of a concession in an era of low oil prices. Plus, Arco, BP, and Chevron will be busy for the next decade drilling the hell out of the equally fragile Alaska Petroleum Reserve just west of Prudhoe Bay.

Old time Alaskan hands like Alan Stein, who used to be executive director of the Salmon Bay Protective Association, have seen it all before. "It was a professional maneuver by all parties: the enviro groups, the White House, and the Alaska congressional delegation," Stein told us. "Everybody gets something off the back of the Tongass."

Nature & Politics appears weekly in the Anderson Valley Advertiser ( 12451 Anderson Valley Way, Boonville, CA 95415, $40/year). Cockburn and St. Clair also edit the biweekly newsletter CounterPunch, which "tells the facts and names the names" (3220 N. Street NW, PMB 346, Washington, DC 20007-2829, $40/year, www.counterpunch.org).