The Book of the Tongass (The World As Home) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1571312269 ISBN 13: 9781571312266

Publisher: Milkweed Editions, 1999

Synopsis

In the southeast corner of America's most rugged state lies the last contiguous expanse of temperate rain forest on the planet, much of it within the Tongass National Forest. With Glacier Bay at its northern end, the Tongass lies on a maze of islands and along a coastal strip protected by a range of mountains. The Tongass lives up to its state's reputation for wildness, natural beauty, and battles over how the land has been and will be used. In The Book of the Tongass, 13 Alaskans describe the region's spectacular forest and wildlife, its economic opportunities, and in two pieces by Tlingit storytellers, its oral history.

About this title

Review

Lacing across the cold fjords and salmon streams of southeastern Alaska, the Tongass is America's largest national forest, larger than the state of West Virginia. It is also little known beyond the immediate region, and its obscurity has been of much use to the timber companies that, operating with the federal government's permission, have for years been clearing huge sections of the old-growth rainforest--and, it seems, for trivial ends. "Think of the stately Sitka spruce and you think of Chopin and sounding boards in the world's finest pianos," writes coeditor Don Snow, "but in the same thought you must also make room for the cellophane that wraps packages of cigarettes. Think of the soft-needled western hemlock and the strength it offers to hold a house together, but at the same time, consider rayon." It is possible, Snow and his fellow contributors maintain, to work this vast forest without wide-scale destruction, to log it in sustainable ways; so the native people of the Tongass have been doing for generations. But it is necessary, they add, to think of the Tongass and other old-growth forests for what they have to offer the future, as vast libraries of biological information, instead of a resource for short-term profits. This book takes readers deep inside the forest, giving an account of its natural wealth. It also guides them through the thickets of law and economics surrounding the public-lands forestry industry. Activists will find it of much value for its clear explication of the ongoing debate surrounding how the Tongass is to be used. --Gregory McNamee

From Kirkus Reviews

An ecologists sourcebook on an Alaskan region that has become a rallying point in the battle to preserve old-growth forests. The Tongass, a vast forest on Alaskas southeastern coast, has long provided a sizable portion of the nations timber. Board feet in these parts are often expressed in billions, writes co-editor Snow, which implies a massive richnessbut board feet also means the killing of trees, hundreds of thousands of acres of some of the greatest trees on earth in the greatest temperate rain forest on earth. The timber industry is a major employer, he adds, and also a major political force in Alaska; that industry is made up of many players, including, increasingly, Native American corporations that are clear-cutting the forest just as rapidly as are their Anglo counterparts. Servid (director of the Island Institute in Sitka, Alaska) and Snow (editor of Northern Lights magazine) and their contributors, most of them Alaska-based writers and conservationists, assemble powerful arguments to preserve the old-growth forest. Some of those arguments are framed in legal language, and naturally enough, they make for slow going for readers untrained in such matters as federal withdrawals, takings initiatives, and aboriginal claims. Others are more emotional, even spiritual, among them narratives by Native people of the region. Still others are given in standard reverence-for-the-land essay format, some by practiced hands like the anthropologist Richard Nelson, many by less accomplished writers. The whole package is effective in presenting the Tongass as a special place worth protecting, difficult though it may be to do so. As Snow remarks, The most important questions about Southeast Alaska in this time of painful transition are not questions of dollars and measurements, but rather questions about values and ideals. Environmental activists will find this book to be persuasive and useful. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Milkweed Editions
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 1571312269
• ISBN 13: 9781571312266
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 275
• Editor: Servid Carolyn, Snow Don