Short Wave - Logging 'The Lungs' of North America

Episode Date: October 23, 2019

The world's largest intact temperate rainforest is in a place you may not expect: southeast Alaska. The Trump administration wants to eliminate a longstanding rule protecting the Tongass National Forest from logging and road construction. Why? And what might this mean for one of the top carbon sinks in the world? Maddie talks with reporter Emily Kwong about the Tongass.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Maddie Safaya here with our very own shortwave reporter and sometimes host Emily Kwong. What do you got for us today? Well, I have a story about the largest intact temperate rainforest in the world. And guess where it is? Um. Maddie, come on. It's in Alaska.

Alaska. Yes, Alaska. That's where you used to report. Yes. Before Shortwave, I was reporting for an NPR member station, KCAW, in the Tongass National Forest. That's the largest national forest in America. And the setting for a classic Alaskan radio show, Encounters. Encounters.

Oh, this is the intro. Hi, I'm Richard Nelson for Encounters. Program of observations, experiences, reflections on the world around us. I really love it. Yeah. Richard Nelson is a legend in Southeast Alaska. He's a scientist. And as I play you a clip from his show, I want you to imagine this place.

It's 3,000 miles from where we are in Washington, D.C. Well, it's a perfect time here in the middle of summer to get far away from the clatter and racket of life in town and savor the quiet and tranquility. Makes me think of lines from a classic Robert Service poem, The Spell of the Yukon, where he writes, It's the great big, is he reading us poetry? Yeah.

You never read me poetry. I brought you Richard Nelson. It's the beauty that fills me with wonder. It's the stillness that fills me with peace. But often as right now... I'm so into this. That's the Tongass. A lot of people are talking about it right now

because last week, the Trump administration announced it intends to open access for logging and road construction there. And this is implications far beyond Alaska. Okay, so today on the show, we talk about the role of the Tongass National Forest. And how a policy. change could impact trees that have been storing carbon for centuries. Okay, so we're talking about the Tongass National Forest. Where do you want to start? I want to start with Anthony Christensen.

Okay. People call him Tony. He was born in Heideburg, Alaska, and Prince of Wales Island. The population there is just shy of 400. A little baby town. That's true. Tony is the mayor. He knows the Tongass well because he lives in it. A lot of people say the forest here is almost impenetrable. It's so thick and you can't see anything. So I have fear of fruits oils. The Tongass is massive. Nearly 17 million acres.

And walking through it, Maddie, it's like being in a fantasy novel, I must say. If you can imagine you have hemlock and red cedar, yellow cedar, spruce trees. Some of them are enormous skyscrapers, widest cars. We're not talking exactly about trees you can hug. You don't know how long my arms are. We're talking about old-growth forest. some of the most ancient trees in America, 400, 500, even 800 plus years old. And it's here that Tony and his family have hunted and fished for generations.

Tony is a member of the Haida tribe, and the Tongass is their indigenous land. And I have to imagine it has like a pretty big role in the economy too. Absolutely. You know, he grew up on the deck of a fishing boat. The Tongass is a huge spawning site for wild salmon on the west coast. And as a teenager in the 1990s, Tony found work through the long. logging industry. His family operated a tugboat that helped load massive trees onto ships for export to China, Japan, and other places. How big were these logs that you were pulling on to the tugboat?

Wow. That's massive. Yeah, they're massive trees. This is peak timber. Prince of Wales was dotted with logging camps in this time. This happened in Sitka, too, where I used to live. Trees have long been economically important to the region, but they're critical for something else, too. Sucking carbon out of the atmosphere. Do you know about the carbon cycle? I've heard of her.

It's that cycle where trees draw carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and lock it away for centuries stored in their leaves and stems, branches and roots. And that natural process of carbon sequestration and trees, it's really critical when we think about, you know, how much excess carbon is in the atmosphere. So from like a global warming perspective, this is pretty important. Exactly. We need those rainforests to survive. That's Dominic Della Sala, chief scientist for the Geos Institute in Oregon. And the trees will do fine without us, but they're pulling that carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and acting as the planet's lungs. So you can imagine why Dominic was pretty distraught when news broke last week that the U.S. Forest Service wants to exempt Alaska from something called the roadless rule.

What's that? Well, the roadless rule has been kicking around since the Clinton administration. It bans road building and logging on designated areas. But the Forest Service, at the request of Alaskan leadership, like Senator Lisa Murkowski. So you know, I always have to talk about the Tongass when we're talking about our U.S. our forests. She and other lawmakers have been pushing for a change to the roadless rule for years. But about 93% of its lands are off limits to most development, which certainly does

not benefit the 32 islanded communities that are located there. It's really hard to have an economy when everything is off limits to you. And the Trump administration appears to be on board with that. Last week, the Forest Service said it preferred the most extreme option in changing the roadless rule to end all road building restrictions in the Tongass. It makes 165,000 acres of old growth forest open for logging. Right. Okay. So this is obviously, very complicated situation, but from a strictly environmental perspective, is that bad? Well, it's troubling, right? If you consider that the Tongass contains an estimated 8% of carbon in America's forests, cutting that down would undoubtedly release carbon into the

atmosphere. And how is that? Well, one way he measures what's lost is through something called the leaky bucket metaphor. Okay, go on. Picture the forest as a big bucket of water with holes in it. Done. As long as water is falling into the bucket at the same rate as it's leaking out, there's no net loss of that water, right? Same with carbon. So as long as the forest can capture the same amount of carbon as is being lost through tree death and decomposition, even longing, it's okay. But if you cut down that forest, all of a sudden you have punched really big holes in the bucket.

And so even though the forest is growing back, you've punched so many holes in that bucket, you've lost more. Most of the carbon in the original forest bucket and those holes are so big from the logging, you never really capture the amount of carbon that was in the original forest bucket. So when a tree is cut down in a forest, Dominic definitely cares. And remember Tony, the mayor in Heideburg we spoke with earlier? Yeah. He cares too. He used to earn a living through the logging industry as a young man.

But one day, while he was out on a skiff, a little boat, he went by his traditional hunting grounds. while cruising the channel, he looked across the landscape and you know what he saw? What? Clear-cut logging. Huge swaths of land without trees. He had been a part of the industry for over a decade, remember. But this site, so close to home, hurt his soul. And it's one of the reasons he changed careers.

He's now the director of natural resources for the Heideberg Cooperative Association, the local tribe, weighing in on how the forest is used. Now, I should say, the timber industry in southeast Alaska is a shrew. shadow of what it used to be in the late 20th century. And relaxing the roadless rule will likely create jobs. But it would also do the kinds of things to the environment that Tony fears. Alaskans are already struggling with climate change. The state is heating up twice as fast as the global average. I mean, this feels like a lot of the climate reporting we do, right? It's not straightforward. There are people that need jobs. The economy, you know, obviously needs to

prosper in those areas. But it's, you know, at the cost of, you know, at the cost. of the environment, which they also depend on. So what happens now? So the Forest Service, they've put out this paper, a draft environmental impact statement on what will happen to the Tongass if the roadless rule is changed. And there's 60 days for the public to weigh in on that decision. We don't know what's going to happen with it. It's all up to the Secretary of Agriculture, Sunny Purdue. He'll make a final decision about the Tongass, about the Roadless Rule by June 2020. I'm Maddie Safia. This is Shortwave.

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