Reopening of forest for lumber stirs debate in Alaska

TONGASS NATIONAL FOREST, Alaska -- Old-growth hemlock and spruce trees, enough to build a suburban subdivision with 30 homes, have been clear-cut and left to rot at the northern end of the nation's largest national forest.

The trees -- some of them stripped, stacked beside a new road, and awaiting a logging truck that apparently will never come -- are the abandoned tail end of a timber sale that, on the front end, earned the US Treasury about $45,000 but cost US taxpayers about $2 million to set up.

The sale is one of 10 that the US government, in an attempt to keep the timber industry above water, has allowed local companies to walk away from this year.

''It seems crazy," said Floyd Peterson, a commercial fisherman who, as a member of the local Tlingit tribe, can drive his all-terrain vehicle across native land to this otherwise inaccessible corner of the forest. ''Why do the politicians want this timber cut, when there is no market for it?"

The abandoned sale, known as the Humpback-Gallagher sale, is part of a US Forest Service logging program that, on an annual basis, costs the federal government $30 million to $35 million more than it collects in timber sales.

Even with the subsidy, local logging companies struggle to make a profit in this coastal rain forest that sprawls across nearly 17 million acres on the rugged islands and panhandle of southeast Alaska.

Having ordered the reopening of huge areas in this forest that had been closed to new logging roads, the Bush administration has become a major actor in a growing national debate about the value of federal subsidies for a shrinking industry in this fragile, slow-growing forest. Republican budget hawks in Congress have joined with environmentalists in questioning subsidized road-building and logging in the Tongass National Forest.

The House, with bipartisan support for a Republican-sponsored amendment, voted in June to ban federal financing for all new logging roads in the forest. The Senate has yet to vote on the matter.

The conservative National Taxpayers Union said that if logging is not viable in the forest under market conditions, ''taxpayers should not be expected to fund operations of these private companies."

Environmental groups have long maintained that large-scale logging in the Tongass, the world's largest intact temperate rain forest, is ecologically destructive and economically nonsensical.

In the Tongass, this criticism has angered logging company owners and frustrated Forest Service officials. They say the shrinking timber industry in southeastern Alaska is at risk of disappearing altogether, not because it cannot produce lumber at a profit but because decades of environmental lawsuits and fickle federal rules have made it impossible to manage a business that can adapt to the global market.

The story, too, has been shaped by increasingly cutthroat world competition in the forest products industry and by the rise of the lucrative cruise ship business in southeastern Alaska. Tourism and recreation have long since overtaken logging as the region's primary employers and engine of growth.

Cheap timber from Russia and South America has conspired to make logging in this forest, always saddled with labor and transport costs that are among the world's highest, even less competitive as a market commodity.

Meanwhile, cruise ships have made the forest an eco-destination for tens of thousands of summertime tourists. Marketing studies have found that tourists spend about $100 each whenever they got off a boat. They come to watch brown bears, see humpback whales, fish for wild salmon, and buy knickknacks -- not to see clear-cuts striped with logging roads.

As one of its final acts, the Clinton administration closed off about 60 million acres of federal forestland to new roads, effectively preventing new logging or mining. That order fenced off 9.4 million acres of the Tongass, depriving the Forest Service of three-quarters of the land it had been managing for logging.

The rules of the forest are again changing, because of the Bush administration, with the support of Governor Frank Murkowski, a Republican, and Alaska's all-Republican congressional delegation.

The administration exempted the Tongass from Clinton's roadless rule last December; on July 12 it proposed overturning the rule in all federal forests. Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman has said abolition of the roadless rule would end litigation and encourage cooperation between state and federal officials.

But if wood is in short supply, why were felled logs left to rot this year at the abandoned Humpback-Gallagher sale?

Forrest Cole, supervisor of the Tongass for the Forest Service, and logging company owners say that abandoned sale and the nine others abandoned since January were put together by the Forest Service at a time when the federal government was trying to discourage logging. They said the sales are ''uneconomic" because they are on inaccessible terrain with thin tree cover and are too far from sawmills.

''We should never have bid on them," said Steve Seley, president of Pacific Log and Lumber, the largest operator in the Tongass. He canceled a purchase of 17 million board feet of federal timber this year, after concluding that it was too far from his mill to be cut profitably. ''We were too optimistic. We wanted to keep our people employed."

Senator Ted Stevens, Republican of Alaska, chairman of the Appropriations Committee and a champion of logging in the Tongass, made these contractual escapes possible by attaching a rider to last year's appropriations bill. The Bush administration then endorsed the measure.

Environmental groups, and budget hawks critical of public subsidies to private companies, have a much different take on the latest round of rule changes in the Tongass.

''There is more than enough timber available from existing roads to fully supply the timber industry at levels they have been cutting in recent years without building new roads," said Tom Waldo, a staff attorney at Earthjustice, which is suing the Forest Service in federal court in Alaska.

The suit says the Forest Service, in part to justify its large payroll of about 500 employees in southeastern Alaska, chronically overstates market demand and wastes money preparing timber sales that are not needed. It says much of the most valuable -- and economically logged -- timber in the forest was cut decades ago.