Alaska's Rainforest The Tongass Under Threat by the Bush Administration
Many consider the Tongass National Forest to be the "crown jewel" of our national forest system. Governor Murkowski of Alaska, and the Bush administration are agressively pursuing this ecological wonderland for logging.
Logging the Tongass
Southeast Alaska, the 500-mile long panhandle of Alaska, is rainforest country. It is a lush area of a thousand forested islands and fiords near the northern end of the great coastal temperate rainforest that sweeps far northward from the California redwoods up along the Gulf of Alaska. This kind of forest, found in several countries, was always the rarest forest type on Earth. Because of this rarity and a history of intense logging, it is even more threatened than tropical rainforests. About one-third of the old-growth temperate rainforest remaining on Earth is in the Alaska panhandle -- and although the forest here is still intact, it is in great jeopardy.
Surprisingly, the great ancient rainforest of Alaska's panhandle has no official name. We call it the "Tongass Rainforest." Once, the Tongass National Forest was comprised of the entire Tongass Rainforest. Over recent decades, however, much of the best forestland has been turned over from the national forest to private ownership and the State of Alaska. Although reduced in size, at 17-million acres the Tongass National Forest is now about the size of West Virginia and is still by far our largest national forest.
The Tongass Rainforest is home to an abundance of wildlife unlike anywhere else in the United States -- five species of salmon, whales, grizzly bears, black bears, wolves, black tail deer, wolverines and magnificent birds such as the bald eagle, northern goshawk and marbled murrelet.
Looking at either the Tongass Rainforest as a whole or just the Tongass National Forest, most of the landmass actually is not forested. Fully two-thirds of it is rock, ice, muskeg and shrub forest. The remaining third is so-called "productive forest" or "commercial forest," but trees on the majority even of this third are so small they are unattractive to the logging industry, and the habitat they offer is not exceptional. The fight over logging here is primarily over a small fraction of the forest -- the big-trees.
Activists pay homage to an old growth tree in the Tongass Rainforest
Greenpeace
www.savebiogems.org/tongass
Who Is Destroying the World's Forests?
