Thursday, July 31, 2014

Kindly put your nose in Nose

* The Tongass personal narrative (Reflections in Blue and Green) is a good beach read, if I say so myself, environmental journalism about a rare and little-known piece of America: (http://cjonwine.blogspot.com/2014/07/theres-tongass-among-us.html)
* Likewise, my series on the American west, Lighting Out for the Territories, taken from The Kingdom in the Country, will interest you if you haven't seen it (promise):  http://cjonwine.blogspot.com/2014/04/the-fastest-gun-in-west.html
* Other related posts - Assassination Louisiana Style, Letters from the Equator, Beasts of the Southern Wild - can be found in the table of contents at right by scrolling down.                                                                          

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Tuesday, July 29, 2014

Tempest in a wine glass

                                         

      The word storm generated by writing sessions at the national wine bloggers' conference in Santa Barbara this summer (https://grapecollective.com/articles/5-reactions-to-the-panel-of-professional-wine-writers-at-the-2014-wine-bloggers-conference, http://thedrunkencyclist.com/2014/07/22/wine-bloggers-conference-in-defense-of-old-white-men/, et al) is both unexpected, and unfortunate. Steve Heimoff, Mike Dunn and I were invited there to talk about writing, and consequently denounced by some bloggers as old, white, male and... short. Thus in one oft-repeated assertion the complainers revealed themselves to be sexist, agist, racist, and vertically discriminatory. That's quite a literary achievement.
      Well, I want everyone to know that I'm six feet tall. That's a couple of inches above the national average and I worked hard for every one of them. Not easy getting to six feet in Memphis: too many glasses of  milk to get down, reins on bourbon and Camels, standing up straight in endless heat and humidity. Yes, it's absolutely true that I'm a man, older than the average American, and pitifully Irish, Welsh, English, Dutch, and probably Cherokee (my grandmother, bless her heart, never really explained).
       Not much I can do about any of it, but I can say that good writing does not depend upon these things. It depends upon having a clear vision of what you want to say, an acceptance of what's good writing and what isn't, and an honest assessment of one's own work. All these things are missing in this fight, replaced by an insistence upon being praised for writing badly in a silo resounding with the complaints of the equally aggrieved.
       The truth is that writing well requires not just practice but also what Hemingway (yes, that ultimate old white male of indeterminate height) called a good, built-in shit detector. Most of the aggrieved lack one. My advice to them - and to any aspiring writer - is: "Develop a sense of humor. And look beyond yourself." 
                                                                             
      (http://www.amazon.com/Nose-Novel-James-Conaway/dp/1250006848/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1362180145&sr=1-1&keywords=nose)

Thursday, July 17, 2014

Reflections in Blue and Green, 9

                                                                         
                                                 The View from On High
          The Sikorsky Long Ranger's plastic bubble, high above the Honker Divide, trembled from the action of the rotors. Commentary was provided by the chief forester from the Ketchikan Pulp Company, owner of helicopter, using interlocking audio cables and headsets. "That canoe route down there is for the strong of back and weak of mind," he said, not knowing I had been down there the week before. "People say these vast lands should be saved. Saved for what?"
    Somewhere below was an island where afternoon sunlight cuts through trees at the shore to reveal faces carved in wood. You have to know where to look, and few do. Consequently the renditions of beaver, wolf and man have survived the century, unmolested by all but the weather, dumbly scrutinizing passing motor launches instead of the high-prowed canoes that once nuzzled the coast. Kneel there and you can still feel, beneath the pine needles, rows hoed long ago by the Haida for planting potatoes. Thank god these guys didn't know where that island was.
     The Long Ranger passed over the very spot in Thorne Lake where Susanna had cooked pesto with macaroni for our party, on the bottom of an overturned aluminum canoe and in glorious celebration of the last portage. That day we had all been proud of an accomplishment that could not be quantified nor explained to the chief forester: "People who aren't in shape aren't going to be able to get in there," he said. "We already have eight million acres like that. That's what really grinds us up here - it's saved for the environmental elite. I can't take my 66-year-old mother in there because there's no road."
     The paradox of the forester's words was apparent from the air: logging, and logging roads, meant access to what would no longer be there if his mother had arrived to see it. Wild places were too difficult for ordinary citizens, according to the former governor, Walter Hickle, who once pointed out that Alaska "can kill you." But wilderness remains a commodity in insufficient supply to meet demands, even in Alaska.                      

     Broderick Nash wrote in Wilderness and the American Mind, "Alaska represents inhospitable environmental qualities in extremes unprecedented in previous American experience." And, "powered by modern technology, dreams could become realities in Alaska." Projects that required a decade or more in the Old West can now be done here in a season. What KPC considered an aerial affirmation of plentiful timber on Prince of Wales demonstrated instead that only this corridor of old-growth remained between Sweetwater Lake and Thorne Bay.
     Meanwhile about 80 per cent of the trees cut on the Tongass were being shipped abroad, most of them to Japan, not transformed into pulp or otherwise into jobs for Alaskans but simply lost to the nation or their origin.
    The Forest Service's 100-year rotation plan presumed the forest would return in force after being clear-cut, but most biologists agreed that a 300-year rotation was more realistic. After the first few years, the regenerating forest constituted a dense, uniform, mostly sterile palisade; logging by small operators, slower, relatively benign, virtually eliminated by the long term timber contracts, would have produced a quite different landscape.
     People in Southeast, riven with transcendent notions of freedom and the natural beauty - Misty Fiord, Glacier Bay - were party to some spectacular ugliness as well: clear-cuts like patches of mange on the firred haunches of mountains, timber camps with the social problems associated with inner cities (substance, spouse, and child abuse), and the drizzling smokestacks of the Ketchikan Pulp mill, visible across Clarence Strait where most of the Prince of Wales timber was bound.
     KPC was operating its mill on an interim basis, all the while selling the Tongass timber abroad. Management claimed declining demand for pulp on the world market no longer made the business profitable, but there were bigger problems at the mill, much like those engendered at Sitka. Louisiana Pacific was considering selling that smelly industrial hulk, no doubt influenced by the two raids on the mill by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the last 18 months. Agents were searching for evidence of possible criminal violations of environmental laws; the federal government had also filed a civil suit alleging numerous violations of the Clean Water and Clean Air acts — the Sitka APC mess all over again.                    

     During a tour of the mill I saw firsthand the enormous amount of water required to wash pulp, felt the weight of the past in the decrepit equipment and saw it in the faces of the people working there, actors in a discredited drama that had begun at the time they were born. "Log the Earth First" advised the sign attached to the glass cubicle behind which sat the saw operator. "We'll log the other planets later."
     Outside the mill, the supervisor viewed industrial jet skis, called "log broncs," used to sort timber in the crowded bay. He acknowledged that most Alaskans are unhappy with the mill. "It was set up to make use of the forest and was too successful," he said bitterly, "Now people can't stand the sight of it," in large part because of the selfish decisions of those running it, and the venality of those politicians serving them.

                     Coda
     The Environmental Protection Agency would eventually determine that the land occupied by the Ketchikan Pulp Company  was contaminated with lead, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), arsenic, and petroleum compounds. Contaminated soils were removed and EPA placed long-term controls on the property to protect the cleanup. The bottom of Ward Cove was contaminated with ammonia, hydrogen sulfide, and 4-methylphenol. EPA dredged about three acres of sediments in Ward Cove, capped about 27 acres with clean material, and left another 50 acres of contaminated sediments to recover naturally, if they could, all at huge cost to taxpayers. 
   KPC officially went out of business in 1997. The mill was later demolished by explosives and tickets sold to locals who wanted to watch.                   
   (This is the last post in the Tongass series, which started on July 2.)
           


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Tuesday, July 15, 2014

Reflections in Blue and Green, 8

      (This series begins with http://cjonwine.blogspot.com/2014/07/theres-tongass-among-us.html)                                                      

                             
       Prince of Wales Island, by water

     The trip, like most in the pelagic envelope of Southeast, involved aquatics. It was launched only after a careful vetting of water repellents: dry bags, rain gear, Juneau boots, tents, canoes. There were six of us who set out in the rain on Hatchery Creek, a clear muskeg stream on Prince of Wales Island tinged with what might have been molasses, a watery paradox of light and darkness leading south into the Honker Divide.
The Russians, masters of the readily available, cut some of these coastal forests for charcoal in the nineteenth century, after decimating the populations of sea otter, walrus and people in the Aleutians, but they shied away from Alaska's daunting interior. Not so the Americans, drawn to what became Alaska by its proximity to Asia and the prospects of trade there. The Western Union Telegraph Company envisioned an intercontinental telegraph line, the ongoing expansionist dream of the 1840s, running northwestward through Russian America and Siberia to St. Petersburg.
In 1857 Western Union financed an expedition, and although the project was cancelled after the laying of the trans-Atlantic cable, data amassed by the Alaskan venture were instrumental in persuading Congress to purchase Alaska in 1867. Secretary of State William H. Seward's "folly" was arguably the most valuable addition to the United States after the Louisiana Purchase, involving as it did a land mass of continental proportions that has become the earth's last such extensive, biologically rich and diverse, reasonably intact natural refuge of inestimable value to the planet.                      
The colors would have excited Monet, but not all the untidy botany: skunk cabbage blooming on the banks, big fallen timber cozening the bends, what Alaskans refer to affectionately as "the woody bushes." Prince of Wales, the third largest island in North America, has produced billions of board feet of timber in four decades, and the Forest Service wanted an additional 450 million. So did what was left of the Ketchikan Pulp Company, the governor, and Alaskan's congressional delegation.
The canoeists - including me and daughter Susanna - wanted this section preserved as a conduit for animals and the occasional human. One of them, a professional environmentalist in hip boots and an Anarack, said, "Fifty per cent of Tongass timber that has been cut has been cut on Prince of Wales. Now they want to clear-cut..." He paused, water dripping from his nose onto the map, "...right over there. They have to be stopped."
John Muir was his spiritual predecessor. Muir traveled the length of Southwest in a canoe and wrote about its "endless rhythm and beauty." He was a member of the last Alaskan expedition of the century, also inspired by the prospect of the Asia trade. Edward Henry Harriman, railroad tycoon, having recently merged the Union Pacific and Southern Pacific, wanted a tunnel beneath the Bering Strait so he could send trains from New York to Paris.
   In 1899, under the banners of science and triumphant capitalism, he and 25 scientists, professors, photographers and artists steamed up the Alaskan coast aboard Harriman's George W. Elder with personal servants, two stenographers, a doctor, a nurse, a chaplain and 11 hunters. Nature was encountered, but no tunnel site.                     

(Members of the Harriman Expedition on the wharf at Dutch Harbor, 1899, photographed by Edward Curtis.)

I tried to imagine Muir coping with the current environmental debate, with its overlapping government hegemonies and proliferating, explosive acronyms - "T-LUMP," "C-POW, "V-POP". The Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA), passed in 1980, established 5 million acres of wilderness on the Tongass, relatively little of it old-growth, and promised 450 million board feet of timber annually to the two pulp mills in Southeast. This perpetuated the exclusion of smaller timber operators and kept the price paid by APC and KPC well below market value.
To assure that the cut was achieved, the Forest Service received $40 million a year from the U.S. Treasury, a bonanza to be spent on road building, studies and other enhancements important to the regional bureaucracy. A decade after passage of ANILCA, almost half the big trees on the Tongass had been cut, and the Forest Service had lost hundreds of millions of dollars in the below cost timber sales. Congress then pressured the Forest Service to revise its Tongass Land Management Plan (TLMP) to include some protection for old-growth and wildlife.
The service, in defense, used a working draft of the document to convince the Senate that it would manage the Tongass correctly, thereby getting the 1990 Tongass Timber Reform Act (TTRA) passed. The Forest Service was instructed by Congress to pay more attention to the real price of trees, and the demands of forest users other than timber companies, but it soon launched a revision of the revised Tongass Land Management Plan that essentially eliminated the strong provisions for preserving old-growth.          

The cabin on Galea Lake was a bare, one room structure with a viewshed full of cutthroat trout rising to mirrored old-growth. The cabin is maintained by the Forest Service, which by law has to provide for all users, hence the words on the rustic signs outside all national forests attest ("Land of many uses"). But parsimony was apparent in the scant accommodations and trail markers swallowed in the Honker's profusion.
The lake amplified the nasal insistence of Canada geese, replaced during the night by the calling of wolves, the most enduring cliche' of American wildness and a sound few Americans have actually heard, powerful and reverberant.
  Portages in ancient forests are complicated by roots the size of pythons. Unabashed photosynthesis produces a biomass here unmatched in other rain forests, including the Amazon's. The Tongass husbands distinctly visible organisms, too, among them black flies excited by the discovery of human beings hauling canoes over two miles of needle tamp and muskeg. Sweat mingled with some of the 200 inches of rain falling annually in Southeast. Whenever my toil ceases, the chill is there, to be combated with hard salami, raisins, peanut butter and iodized draughts of the Thorne River auger against hypothermia, or so I hope.               

That's Susanna (feralstudio.com) second from left, and me far right.
    Next and finally: A coda for all time
                                                

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Sunday, July 13, 2014

Reflections in Blue and Green, 7

     (This series begins with the July 2 post: http://cjonwine.blogspot.com/2014/07/theres-tongass-among-us.html)                                    
                  
                   The Chief
     The Forest Service lives within Agriculture's accretion of Victorian and New Deal architecture near the corner of 14th Street and Independence Avenue, halfway down the Mall from Capitol Hill. The then-chief of the USFS, Jack Ward Thomas, slumped in a chair, his back to the Washington Monument, the classic field man saddled with duty in the imperial city. His pallor and width of beam testified to no great hardship, his open collar and turquoise bollo contrasting with the businessman's tack worn by most Washington bureaucrats. The farther one gets from the woods, the more he stresses affiliation with it.
The apprehension voiced by some of Thomas's colleagues when he was appointed suggested that he would be a different sort of chief, tough but enlightened, in the tradition of Gifford Pinchot, Roosevelt's sylvan lama, of Aldo Leopold and Bob Marshall. Thomas had worked his way up through the system and was not chosen by a cabal of top Forest Service brass and the outgoing chief, as was customary; he was expected to inspire timber beasts, stump-jumpers and the rest of the service's pantheon to bring about change.
Thomas was eager to dispel this notion. He had to deal with the Senator (Stevens) and others in Congress who wanted to eliminate all restrictions on logging in the national forests. Any actions perceived to be on behalf of wildlife reflected the desires of the Clinton White House, he says, and the momentary desires of "the democracy," but not necessarily his or those of his agency. Widespread charges of pressure put on Forest Service biologists to alter their science to allow larger cuts were worth pursuing, he agreed, but "I'm not running around looking for biologists."                   

  
(Aldo Leopold, about as far from what
the Forest Service has become as a
man could get)

     The list of honors awarded Thomas — the Aldo Leopold Medal, the Wildlife Society General Chuck Yeager Award — was long, but the suggestion that some consensus has evolved at his agency out of the disruption caused by the issues of old-growth and endangered species annoyed him. "The idea that there is a mentality within the service is erroneous. There are 30,000 individuals... I can't get consensus in my office about whether or not to go to lunch."
But there is a mentality and it remains a problem. The Service's legacy of working in difficult terrain when getting the cut out was the only concern produced a military cast of mind, a chain of command that punishes dissent and holds in contempt the views of civilians. Today the general and his lieutenants must deal with anyone in off the street, not just the timber industry, senators, and journalists.
    Thomas, rude as he was, sounded almost wistful when he spoke of the remove of southeastern Alaska, "where the distances are long, and time spent getting there much longer." Then schemes devised in Washington, and Tokyo, could be put into effect with the rigor and independence of a Roman governor overseeing the marauding Celts.
      (Next: wilderness by water)              

            

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Saturday, July 12, 2014

Reflections in Blue and Green, 6

 
                           

          The Goshawk Chronicles

Evolutionary development has been extraordinarily fast on the Tongass. Cut off from the continent by mountains and glaciers, protected from north and south by its unique insularity, the Alexander Archipelago has entertained no genetic dumping. Many bird subspecies are found only here and on the coast of British Columbia: the Swainson's thrush, the Prince of Wales river otter, the Coronation Island vole, the Wrangle Island red-backed vole, the Alexander Archipelago wolf, probably the only one in North America uncorrupted by coyote genes.
The study of island biogeographybiology as a distinct product of insularity—is fruitful on the Tongass. The natural isolation afforded by thousands of rocky up-thrusts in an inland sea increases the chances of extinction, since populations are small and more vulnerable to random, or "stochastic", events like all of one species being reduced to a single sex. The smaller the population, the greater the chances of extinction.
Conservation biology, concerned with the propagation of species, has taken the concept of island biogeography and applied it on dry land, where logging has isolated what forest there is and created unnatural insularity. The spotted owl in Washington state, from this perspective, lives in what are essentially islands of old growth in seas of clear-cuts. The problem is compounded on the Tongass because clear-cuts occur on real islands. Habitat conservation areas must therefore perform their function in the midst of cutover land masses already surrounded by deep Pacific waters.
Forest Service supervisors view conservation biology the way Latin American dictators view liberation theology. Forest Service employees, including biologists, are expected, in the lapidary phrase of the supervisor in Ketchikan, "to be constructive." If he thinks a proposed cut will be more detrimental to wildlife than is legal, he told me, "I can tweak it" © make minor alterations to conform to the technicality of the law.             

The Queen Charlotte goshawk (Accipiter gentilis laingi), is endemic to Southeast and the coast of British Columbia, a unique biome composed of islands and islands within islands. It is closely related to the northern goshawk found in much of the western United States, including the Kaibab National Forest in Arizona, where a slight, bearded biologist named D. Coleman Crocker-Bedford used to work. There he conducted exhaustive studies of the acrobatic, finicky raptor that serves as a useful indicator species, and discovered that goshawks require extensive stands of densely canopied mature and old growth forests to prosper.
He advised his Forest Service supervisor in the late '80s that timber harvesting should be reduced in the Southwest to protect this and other species, and was advised by his FS superiors not to publish his findings. He did publish, and an independent scientist later praised the study as "one of the most extensive and rigorous investigations ever done into the habitat requirements of a raptorial bird." But Crocker-Bedford ended up in Ketchikan.
In 1990 he chaired an interagency group of biologists from the Forest Service and Alaska's Department of Fish and Game, the so-called "V-pop" committee, concerned with "viable populations" of wildlife. It sought to determine if requirements of the National Forest Management Act were being met on the Tongass, and the goshawk was just one of several species in doubt.
At the time a joint conference of the U.S. Congress was resolving differences over the Tongass Timber Reform Act. A draft environmental impact statement had called for a quarter of the Tongass' remaining old growth to be permanently side aside for wildlife, most of it in tracts of more than 1,000 acres and some as large as 40,000 acres, and the Forest Service wanted none of this. It lobbied individual members of Congress, informing them that wildlife could be protected while 450 million board feet were being cut every year, and Congress capitulated.
The committee on which Crocker©Bedford sat recommended maintaining old-growth "cores," wildlife transit corridors, and habitat conservation areas (HCAs) for several species. This would have curtailed, or eliminated, some logging. The regional forester in Juneau ordered a supplemental environmental impact statement prepared. (In the Forest Service, if a review displeases management, it is re©reviewed, sometimes indefinitely.) This time the committee's recommendations were rejected.                    
Crocker-Bedford resigned from the chairmanship but not from the Forest Service. In the fall of 1991 he was deposed in a suit brought by loggers in the Southwest, where his original goshawk study was being used to shut down timber sales under requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act and the Endangered Species Act. The timber companies sought to discredit the study and its author.
Being deposed was not pleasant, Crocker-Bedford told me. He was advised that he could not have his own attorney and had to be represented by a political appointee from the U.S. Attorney's office. He was interrogated for fourteen hours by the timber company lawyers attempting to discredit him, before his own attorney weighed in. 
    "He was worse than they were," said Crocker-Bedford, of the representative from Justice during the Bush administration. When Crocker-Bedford asked this lawyer what effect he thought Crocker-Bedford's ordeal would have on other wildlife biologists, on soils people and hydrologists, the lawyer said, "We know what we're doing."
The Forest Service had let the spotted owl get away from it; that wasn't going to happen with the goshawk.
Crocker-Bedford was accused of negative networking and advised to stay out of discussions of goshawk management and conservation biology. He was ordered not to attend a goshawk seminar and not to defend his study or his reputation. A colleague told him he would get a raise and more influence within the service if he discovered that clear-cuts and small trees were beneficial to wildlife.                    
  In 1992, Crocker-Bedford wrote to the chief of the service, then F. Dale Robertson: "You stated there must be no retaliation against employees who discover problems or recommend new management practices... Because the results of my Forest Service approved, careful monitoring were used in appeals and litigation, I have been subjected to repeated retaliation."
Nothing happened until after the election, when Jack Ward Thomas had been appointed and rumor had it that he would be coming to the Tongass. Service people began to say they were sorry that all those bad things had happened to Crocker-Bedford, but not that they had done them. This was not an isolated case. Many other wildlife biologists felt the chill of empirical objectives.
    One, Duane Fisher, a biologist in Juneau, had the unhappy task, in 1992, of incorporating the recommendations of the V-pop committee in the Forest Service's draft environmental impact study. Those recommendations included habitat conservation areas for the four most vulnerable species in the Tongass: bear, marten, wolf, and goshawk. If they had been adopted, the service would have been forced to set aside significantly more forest than it wished.
Fisher refused to reject the V-pop recommendations. "I came up with a high probability that a viability problem might occur in three ecological provinces out of 21," he said, in a mall outside of Juneau where I found him. "I didn't think it was that bad a risk assessment, "but my supervisor didn't like my conclusions."                  
    He wouldn't say so, but it seemed clear to me that the managers of the Tongass wanted an armor-plated forest plan, one without biological uncertainties. They had already tried to dilute the effects of logging on paper, known as "washing the data," by expanding the base under consideration to include the whole Tongass, most of which is rock, muskeg, ice and scrub, not old-growth. But mention of possible extinctions provided chinks that might later be attacked in court.
Fisher could have been ordered to change his conclusions, but that was legally risky for management. Instead, he was told to write more versions. He wrote four, and a Forest Service "writer-editor" wrote a fifth, but Fisher's boss, a road engineer, didn't like the conclusions. He rewrote the report himself, put in his own conclusions - that the forest didn't need additional wildlife habitat - and said they could cut 50 per cent of the old-growth left. So the Forest Service had two different recommendations, one tweaked on the drafting table to allow the cuts the service wanted, and another from the V-pop committee calling for big habitat conservation areas.
The V-pop committee report was again suppressed by the Forest Service. The service's second biologist in charge of the team of reviewing scientists quit in protest, as Crocker-Bedford had done, and Fisher ended up in the bureaucratic gulag with an unsatisfactory rating, pressured to take writing classes and an IQ test. He scored 122, near genius, an embarrassment for those claiming him mentally unequipped to write on the Forest Service's prescribed seventh grade level.
The real problem, of course, was what he was saying, not the way he said it. Yet another peer review was done, also by outside biologists. This one found that no recommendations so far for habitat preservation were sufficient to meet the requirements of the National Forest Management Act, an indication that Fisher's reports had in fact been thoroughly middle of the road. But Fisher was downgraded from GS12 to GS11; it was suggested that he might like to move to Yakitat, Southeast's equivalent of Omaha.                   
"I went through some rough times," he told me, without rancor. He started taking teenagers to Bible camp, umpiring at softball games after work. "That's how I coped."
  The road engineer in charge of the study of dwindling wildlife habitat on the Tongass was named Steven Brink. He was Duane Fisher's boss, and I met with him in the Juneau headquarters where the walls of the Forest Service conference room were covered with maps of the Tongass and charts of related activities and designations © prospective timber sales, set-asides, roads, wilderness, rivers, Tongass past, Tongass future. Logging was represented by black dots; much of the forest looked shot-gunned.          

"If the scientists had their way," said Brink, "we would stop logging and do a complete biological survey. That would kill the economic infrastructure in Southeast and cost $5 million a year for five years."
Better to continue to study the problem, in his view, and log at the same time. "Everything in life is a risk, including management of the forest... There is no evidence that we are having a substantial effect - threatening, or endangering - species."
As a GS14, Brink was one of the most powerful half dozen men on the Tongass, his attitude and appearance consonant with evolution within the Forest Service from the time when the long term timber contracts came into existence. Then the notion of wholesale development of America's national forests, including the building of roads into undisturbed areas, began to take on the glow of muscular philanthropy: engineers saw themselves aiding mankind, as well as harvesting a resource, producing wealth.
    They, not the foresters, rose in an agency that had previously thought of itself as primarily conservationist. But Brink's morphology was that of the hustling, midlevel corporate operative: bright paisley tie, aviator glasses, a touch of mousse, no chlorophyll tones long associated with the service. His words are chosen carefully. A scientist under his supervision was not pressured to take an IQ test and composition classes, he "was given the opportunity to improve his writing." As for the handling of the V-pop data, "if the decision makers felt I wasn't giving them all the information, they would replace me."
Brink worked for a time in Washington, D.C., learning the legal ways of the Forest Service. He was widely quoted in Alaska newspapers on the subject of habitat, using the perspective he gained in the capital: "Humans live in Northeast Washington... and survive and even reproduce, but that isn't their preferred habitat. They'd much rather live in Georgetown. Wildlife are much the same way." Brink and his colleagues had spent years building a defensible cut. Now the strategies reflected in the charts and maps around him were threatened by a bunch of biologists, and they weren't happy about it. "It's all politics," he said. "Maybe that's as it should be - politics is everything."                                                                      
The first Tongass timber sale after the APC contract cancellation totaled 61 million board feet and was 32 times the minimum bid set by the Forest Service. Senator Stevens wrote to the new forest supervisor there, urging him to continue the sizeable cut. "I appreciated our discussion on the recent petitions to list the goshawk and wolf as endangered or threatened in the Tongass. I conclude that very little study has been done related to these animals and sufficient baseline information is not yet available."
           (Next: The Chief)


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Wednesday, July 9, 2014

Reflections in Blue and Green, 5





              The Senator
    He sat at a large desk in a suite of offices on the fifth floor of the Hart Building in Washington, D.C. A small man, he seemed further diminished by the Alaskana all around him - flags, baseball caps, color photographs of unblemished nature, baleen carved with native scenes. Ted Stevens, a Republican, was a member of the Interior appropriations committee and chairman of the Rules Committee and chairman of the Commerce, Science and Transportation sub-committee on federal fisheries. "Stevens gets even" had been the word on the Hill for years and stories of his rough treatment of opponents in Alaska are legion.
    Stevens was able to prevent a study of fish propagation on the Tongass, which might have limited the Forest Service cut there. He attached language to an appropriations bill instructing the Forest Service to encourage "old growth diversification projects" that would redound to the benefit of the Alaska Pulp Corporation, and to aid in a land swap to give the company federal land it occupied.  
    He also attempted in 1994 to deny funds to the Forest Service for  implementing wildlife and other environmental standards already mandated by Congress. He failed, but not quietly. "I regret," he said in a long, rancorous speech on the Senate floor, "that it is necessary once again this year to take the Senate's time to discuss issues pertaining to the Tongass National Forest."
     The amendment would have prohibited the expenditure of funds to implement what Stevens incorrectly called "brand new management practices," including habitat conservation areas he deplored. The occasional association of the fishing industry in Alaska with the conservation movement discomforts the state's long-standing extractive alliance. The PACFISH study Stevens sought to block would have increased the buffers beside streams from 100 to 300 feet.                      
    
     Most fishermen in Alaska, including the trollers that employed about one out of every 25 Alaskans, favored PACFISH, but the senator's actions were endorsed by Alaska's other senator, Frank Murkowski, chairman of Energy and Natural Resources, and by Alaska's sole congressman, Don Young, the House Natural Resources Committee chairman. This was the first time in history that all the nation's natural resources came under the aegis of politicians from a single state, and never had they been less qualified to deal with them.
     Young, during a congressional hearing, had brandished an 18-inch walrus penis while berating an Interior official for suggesting that natives should not be allowed to sell animal parts. "This is a government agency getting involved in something it shouldn't," Young had shouted.
     He regularly characterized government biologists who listed animals as endangered as "idiots" and criticized what he called "the self-centered bunch, the waffle-stomping, Harvard-graduating, intellectual bunch of idiots that don't understand that they're leading this country into environmental disaster."                     

     Young had removed the word "public" from various public lands sub-committees, and referred to Democrats as "socialists." This was pre-Monica, but retribution was definitely in the air. The balanced budget amendment would soon be passed and the government temporarily shut down; reviews of logging in the Pacific Northwest were full of acrimony, as were discussions of sport hunting in Yellowstone, national forests and parks being turned over to the states, more clear-cutting, oil exploration, and floating horizontal skyscrapers, known as cruise ships, in the Inland Passage.
     Young, Murkowski and Stevens were grounded in the politics and social rigidity of the Fifties, the decade when the Forest Service began to go wrong and the Tongass timber contracts came into existence. Their greatest opprobrium was reserved for what they called "extreme environmentalists." The time was coming, Stevens said in the Senate, "when I am going to start making some of these people tell the truth. We could have some laws passed that would put some teeth into what they can and cannot do in the Halls of Congress."
     Few issues had affected Stevens more than the cancellation of the Alaska Pulp Corporation's long-term contract. "The fact that the Sitka mill is closed shows the duplicity of the opponents," Stevens told me. "For years they have been saying we should have a more environmentally sound approach, and we have pursued that."
     His use of the possessive reflected years of championing the APC, KPC, and other commercial enterprises, with conviction. I suggested that APC and KPC had enjoyed a de facto subsidy for nearly 40 years. "Bullshit!" said the senator.
     An aide was holding his coat, since he was bound for a vote on the Senate floor. "Subsidies come out of the United States Treasury. These were competitive bids based on a concept of pricing from the past."
I pointed out that the price depended on the company's profits, and these were nonexistent on paper, according to the Forest Service's own suppressed report.
     "Horse shit!" Stevens had for years demanded and received from the Forest Service regular reports on the Tongass cut. No other senator took such an active role in the management of a single national forest, the size and magnificence of which, like the health of the things living there, made it unique.
      By now he had an arm in the coat. He gestured with the other. "It was an evolving price," he shouted. "The finances of APC have been more responsible than the federal government's."
     "Senator," said the aide. "The vote..."
     "If this generation didn't like the contract, they should have tried to rewrite it." Rewriting would have allowed APC to continue cutting trees on an exclusive, below cost basis. "Those environmentalists are..."
     "Senator..."
     "... revisionists!" And he passed beneath a 10-foot Haida totem pole, the aide still attempting to sheath his other arm.                  
     
         Next: The Goshawk Chronicles

My travel books, The Kingdom in the Country and Vanishing America, can be found at: http://www.fearlessbooks.com/Conaway.htm
and at:




Monday, July 7, 2014

Reflections in Blue and Green, 4

                                                                       

                        Admiralty Island
The DeHaviland Beaver drifted over gray whales breaching in Tenakee Inlet; a pod of killer whales rose and fell through blue-black water. Dockside at Angoon, a native village with a sizeable Anglo population, two teenagers were playing hackeysack. The sign on the wall of the aviation office said, "If it has tires or testicles, you're going to have trouble with it."
KJ stood in the stern of his skiff plowing Chatham Straight, the wind in his droopy mustache, laconically absorbing the miserable weather and the magnificence of the Admiralty Island coast. He had spent 24 years in the Forest Service, and as land use planner for Admiralty suggested to the Forest Service directors of recreation and wildlife in Washington, D.C. the need for an advocate for recreational wilderness. He was told, "'We don't have to put up with that shit anymore.'"
KJ decided conservation efforts were a waste of time. "The whole wilderness concept came out of the Forest Service—Aldo Leopold, Bob Marshall—but supervisors were evaluated on whether or not they met the timber targets, period. Information was driven in whatever direction necessary to justify what they wanted to do."
Some things he witnessed in Southeast still came back to him: slash piled to a depth of 12 feet in clear-cuts; the sound of streams buried beneath fallen trees; the sight of Caterpillars plowing rivers dark with sediment; a Forest Service engineer who, when questioned about the advisability of building roads in unstable terrain above Hobart Bay, saying, "If you can't do it, we'll find somebody who can."
A bald eagle swooped on a school of herring roiling the bottle-green surface of the awesome, in-rushing tide, and rose as a silvery silhouette. "The Tongass Timber Reform Act was unrealistic. All they wanted was the cut. If they had a good plan, they could have rewarded people for doing good work."                    

           (Next: The Senator)  

My travel books, The Kingdom in the Country and Vanishing America, can be found at: http://www.fearlessbooks.com/Conaway.htm
and at:

Sunday, July 6, 2014

Reflections in Blue and Green, 3


                 Hoonah                     

Within the 52-foot salmon purse seiner's scabrous hull lies sophisticated refrigeration and navigational gear. The skipper put out confidently from Auke Bay, near Juneau, bound for Hoonah, the native settlement on Chichagof Island. He followed a course through the Saginaw Channel, around the Mansfield Peninsula, Admiralty Island, south through Lynn Channel, around Point Couverden-"a good place to soak [catch] a halibut"-and then west into Icy Straight.
Humpback whales rolled in 800 feet of water, their broad, black tails glossy under gray skies. Dall porpoises approached at speed and caromed off the prow like aquatic skateboarders. The skipper has seen it all before. He was president of United Fishermen of Alaska and the Southeast Seiners Association and testified years ago before a congressional committee about the Tongass Timber Reform Act. More emphasis should be placed on preserving fish habitat, he said.
Clear-cuts like those visible on the southern tip of Chilkat Peninsula, all part of the Tongass national forest, have a proven, ill effect upon salmon. "A lot of fishermen have worked both sides of this issue—hauled logs, done time at the mill. “They're sensitive about putting people out of jobs. But it's real hard nowadays to fish salmon and not be some kind of environmentalist."
Fishing and processing fish employed more people in Alaska in the 1990s than any other commercial activity, and the natural lamination of the industry to the conservation movement discomforted the state's longstanding extractive alliance. But Sen. Ted Stevens, ranking Republican on the Interior appropriations committee, blocked a study of salmon reproduction, known as PACFISH, on the Tongass, attaching a separate rider to the appropriations bill. 
    The study would have increased the buffers along streams from 100 to 300 feet. Fishermen in Alaska opposed Stevens's rider, including the trollers who employed about one out of every 25 Alaskans, but Stevens's actions were endorsed by Alaska's other, former Republican senator, Frank Murkowski, by Con. Don Young, and by the former governor who “still doesn't know the difference between trawlers and trollers. His aids try to tell him. It's like listening to Lenny Bruce teach Lyndon Johnson to say 'Negro.'"
             
Hoonah was a Tlinget village with a dock high enough to accommodate 20-foot tides, dusty streets, and a medley of well-used and abandoned machinery. Beyond little bungalows built in the '40s were some of the most extensive clear-cuts in Southeast, the dun-colored progeny of the regional native corporation, Sealaska. Native business enterprises had to conform only to the state's notoriously lax, rarely enforced environmental restraints. They had done more damage to the landscape than their mainstream rivals and had taken advantage of tax loopholes to sell debt to other, larger corporations. This led to the logging of otherwise unsullied Admiralty Island by the likes of Disney.
The Tlinget did not like talking about this. The local member of the regional council wasn’t available, and neither was a tribal elder practicing ceremonial dance. Two people who would talk were Gertrude and Bill, she Tlinket, he Haida, who lived together in what might be called a subsistent relationship. "This logging is detestable," she said, and had opposed it for years. "But the people are afraid to speak out."
Natives were no more in control of their corporations than Anglos were of theirs, a surprise to me. She and Hanlon thought the Forest Service intimidated those opposed to logging through its public hearings, which could be technical and contentious, thus enhancing the cut. Bill added, "The Forest Service and Sealaska are in collusion. They play on that fear."
His conversation, like his library, was sprinkled with books about the CIA and the KGB. The conspiratorial bent dated him, as did his graying ponytail. Remnants of east coast-west coast tensions in this remote place were surprising. The couple’s travels indicated the long reach of Native American activism—Washington, D.C., Mexico City, even Libya; they talked of "peoples' courts" for native Alaskans, autonomous cells within the over-arching polity of national forest, state and country, all of them thoroughly white. Native sovereignty, the latest demand in the ongoing unease between the populations in Alaska, asked new concessions and drove some white Alaskans wild.                
The Alaskan Native Claims Settlement Act was supposed to have resolved all that with money and 44 million acres. Almost 700,000 acres went to natives in Southeast, including some of the best trees on the Tongass, and in one decade 500,000 of those acres have been logged, an unimaginable vastness.
The shacks remained in Hoonah, and a new Forest Service headquarters rose with a view of the native-driven clear-cuts shackling mountains like granite pushpins thrust into clouds. Few jobs on the high, tide-tugged dock or in the lumber camps across the bay went to natives, but there were the dividends. All natives received them, even those opposed to their corporations which were going after the timber freed up by the cancellation of the APC contract.                      

The logged land had the best trees and the best of everything else that contributed to subsistence living. "I hate that word," said Gertrude. She held up a basket made from beaten spruce roots, which were disappearing from lowlands dried out by logging. "Every day of my life I deal with the land, for medicine, food, art. I can't live without it."
Her father and brothers traced ever-widening arcs on the Tongass, searching for game beyond the reach of armed sports from Juneau and the logging camps who drove the new roads looking for easily-blastable Sitka black-tail deer. But her freezer was full: venison, luminous frozen fish, containers of salmon berries, blueberries, gray berries, strawberries, cranberries, silk berries
    For dinner there were slabs of broiled salmon steak with dried seaweed — "Tlinget popcorn" — beach asparagus, coffee and more coffee, while in a corner stood canoe paddles, mementoes rather than tools, one carved with an eagle holding a dog salmon in its beak.             

           (Next: Admiralty Island)

 My travel books, The Kingdom in the Country and Vanishing America, can be found at: http://www.fearlessbooks.com/Conaway.htm
and: