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pawns in the whole thing."
K. J. Metcalf has a broader view of how much is at stake in Bush's war on the wild. A tall, laconic man who looks at least a decade younger than his sixty-nine years, Metcalf worked for the U.S. Forest Service for twenty-four years, serving in the Tongass and rising to the post of head ranger of Admiralty Island, a reserve nearly seventy times the size of Manhattan. He worked under seven presidents, from Eisenhower to Reagan, but he says he has never seen the kind of all-out attack on wilderness being mounted by George W. Bush. "It's like he just can't wait to get in there and destroy everything," Metcalf says, settling into his seat on a small floatplane that's headed deep into the forest. As the pilot hits the ignition, Metcalf raises his voice to be heard above the propeller's howl. "And there's a lot to destroy in the Tongass."
A plane flight and a couple of boat rides later, I see what Metcalf means. We're deep in the Tongass, hiking down a path in the forest on Chichagof Island and avoiding swampy areas called muskegs, with their deep potholes of mud and gnarled trees. Before long, we enter a cathedral-like stand of Sitka spruce, the tallest tree in the Tongass, a species that can grow more than 200 feet high and live for 1,000 years. Metcalf stops in front of a huge specimen, tilts back his cap and looks up. The treetop is lost somewhere high above us in the swirling clouds of mist and rain. "This one's a good 600 years old, maybe older," he estimates.
There's something humbling about standing beneath a tree that was already a century old when Columbus set out to find a new route to India. Almost as amazing as the tree itself is the riot of life thriving on and around it. Moss, lichens, fungi and flowering plants by the dozens cover the giant tree's lower reaches, all testimony to the fact that this temperate rain forest contains a greater biomass, acre for acre, than a tropical rain forest. A huge raven calls from its perch high above, its "song" a perfect imitation of a raindrop striking a puddle. It seems like a strange sound to mimic, until Metcalf reminds me that parts of the Tongass receive five times more precipitation than Seattle. During the winter, these big trees prevent most of the snow from reaching the ground, allowing herds of Sitka black-tailed deer to browse the plants below. If the area is clear-cut, Metcalf says, "the valleys will fill up with snow in a bad year, and the deer will get trapped and starve."
As we continue hiking, piles of bear scat serve as a reminder that more than deer are threatened by Bush's planned clear-cuts. I've hiked in wild areas throughout the States, but I've never seen a place with an abundance of wildlife to compare to the Tongass. There are, for example, as many grizzly bears on a single island here as there are in the lower forty-eight states combined. Wolves, which biologists are struggling to reintroduce elsewhere, roam the Tongass as they have for millennia. In low-lying areas of the forest, water spreads out to form wetland habitat for huge flocks of migrating birds, and millions of salmon return here from the sea each summer and autumn to spawn. In some places the bald eagles are as thick as sparrows are in the cities, with as many as 3,000 congregating to feast during salmon runs.
But a clear-cut can choke a stream to death in a matter of days. Without trees and thick understory, water cascades down the hillsides and into the streams, clogging the waterway with mud and debris and blocking the salmon runs that feed the grizzlies. Bears are keystone predators, the top of the food chain. Take them out of the picture and the ecology of the Tongass will be devastated. "Clear-cutting here can do incredible damage to the watershed," Metcalf says.
Spend a few hours in the Tongass, and it's easy to imagine that there's no end to the forest. But this is one of the most durable American myths. From the moment they set foot here, European settlers mistook "vast" for "infinite" and "abundant" for "inexhaustible." I hear echoes of these myths when I speak with Mark Rey, the Bush administration's chief architect for forest policy. Rey argues that the Tongass is just too big, and the areas slated for logging too small, to do any real ecological damage. It's the same rationale the administration has used to push for oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge: What harm could extracting a few crucial resources do in such a vast and remote place?
"The management plan for the Tongass preserves ninety-five percent of it," insists Rey, undersecretary for natural resources and the environment, who has led a three-year effort to exempt the forest from Clinton's roadless rule. Building more roads through the Tongass, he notes, will open only a fraction of the forest -- around 300,000 acres -- to logging. The problem is, that fraction contains some of the oldest and biggest stands of trees in the Tongass -- the giants coveted by industrial loggers for the higher prices they fetch -- and most of them are concentrated in remote, roadless areas that provide crucial habitat for wildlife. Cutting roads deep into the forest to reach those areas, environmentalists warn, could devastate as many as 2.5 million acres.
It's easy to see why timber companies want access to the old-growth trees. A single acre of these giants can contain as much as 100,000 board feet, much of it furniture-quality wood, compared with low-volume stands that yield only one-tenth as much timber per acre, most of it of such poor quality that it has to be "pulped" -- chopped up and dissolved in chemicals to produce cheap products such as cardboard. The big trees are few and far between. Two-thirds of the Tongass consists of swampy areas, rugged alpine mountains of rock and ice, and thickets of scrubland -- all land unsuitable for logging. So to suggest, as Rey does, that the administration is protecting the forest by leaving most of it off-limits to loggers is like claiming the government is saving endangered sea turtles by banning commercial fishing on Midwestern
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