In his State of the State Address, Gov. Bill Walker said that Alaska should export finished products, not raw resources. I couldn’t agree more. Processing resources locally makes sense. Otherwise we become a resource extraction colony, exporting jobs in exchange for a degraded environment.
Large timber sales of hundreds or thousands of acres fall into the second category. The Baby Brown timber sale, on the Haines State Forest, just upriver from the Alaska Chilkat Bald Eagle Preserve, will provide few local benefits while the timber is sent unprocessed to Oregon. Most shocking is that Alaskans pay dearly for this.
Industrial scale sales like the Baby Brown have never made money for either the state or the federal government in Southeast Alaska. During the Tongass Timber Reform Act, Sen. William Proxmire of Wisconsin bestowed his annual “Golden Fleece Award” on the Tongass, and the National Taxpayers Union called for an end to the economic boondoggles associated with Tongass logging. Today, documents from the Alaska Division of Forestry show that the state’s timber program is also a money losing enterprise — Fiscal Year 2014 shows a $6,154,600 budget for the DOF Timber Management Program and $753,100 from timber harvest revenues, or $8.17 spent for every $1 received. Fiscal Year 2015 shows $9.16 spent for every $1 received. Previous years also show significant losses.
Haines-based Lynn Canal Conservation, Inc. has always supported Haines State Forest small timber sales. These provide local jobs, firewood, and finished timber products. I just ordered custom tongue and groove cottonwood boards from a neighbor, one of several small operators in the Chilkat Valley. Other local businesses provide value-added dimensional lumber, beams for custom timber frame construction, logs for homes, and a wide variety of other products.. However, the Baby Brown sale and others like it are simple resource extraction, causing the loss of long-term local jobs and impacts to tourism and fisheries, cornerstones of the local economy.
For decades, biologists with the Pacific Northwest Research Station of the U.S. Forest Service have shown the negative impacts to fisheries of clearcutting. These include changes to stream temperature, dissolved oxygen and invertebrate prey, increased turbidity, sedimentation of spawning beds and negative impacts to hydrology. Old growth acts as a buffer against floods, slowly releasing water to percolate upward through spawning areas. Clearcuts, on the other hand, allow water to run off quickly, leading to increased stream velocity, scouring of spawning beds, and loss of structural elements like log jams that provide rearing habitat. I witnessed this in the 1990’s in a heavily logged tributary of the Chilkat River while doing stream surveys for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.
Clearcutting old-growth can be equally devastating to wildlife like deer, brown bears and goshawks when second-growth forest canopies close after twenty or thirty years, creating a biological desert for many decades.
Currently, climate change is bringing attention to the role forests play in sequestering carbon. Both large old-growth trees and forest soils store huge quantities of carbon. A study published in 2014 of 700,000 trees on every continent found that trees three feet in diameter generated three times as much biomass as trees half that size, thus sequestering more carbon.
Impacts of large clearcuts to tourism are hard to quantify, but significant. According to former Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell, outdoor recreation is now worth nearly as much as pharmaceuticals, motor vehicles, and motor vehicle parts combined — around $646 billion dollars. In towns like Haines, “The Adventure Capital of Alaska,” scenery and an intact environment are essential for businesses based on rafting, bicycling, hiking, skiing, guided hunting, etc.
During a talk in Haines, Gov. Walker asked for suggestions on ways to save the state money. Had I understood then that the state forestry program represents a loss of nearly $6 million annually, I would have suggested the following: rather than sell off unprocessed timber from our state forests, direct forestry offices to focus on small sales to local operators, wildfire suppression, enhancing recreational opportunities and developing additional uses for forest products that do not threaten economic or ecological stability. The money saved could provide essential services that many communities may otherwise lose.
• Eric Holle is the president of Lynn Canal Conservation in Haines.
