Alaska Forest Association: half century of industry service: looking for 'peace in the Tongass.'.

• Author: Swagel, Will

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Among the leaders of the Alaska timber industry, longevity is a common virtue. People working in the forest for a decade consider themselves newcomers. But even among the long timers, George Woodbury stands out.

Raised in Indiana, Woodbury studied Forest Management at Purdue University. He started working in the forest in northeastern Minnesota in the 1950s. The area was then dotted with family run logging operations and small sawmills, supplied by a National Forest that was slowly put off limits due to a public slant toward environmental concerns and increased outdoor recreation and away from resource extraction.

Following better opportunities in 1965, Woodbury came to the Ketchikan Pulp Corp.'s Thorne Bay logging camp on Prince of Wales Island. With as many as 500 residents, Thorne Bay was then the largest logging camp in the world. Woodbury's job was as timber engineer--he'd lay a line around the timber to be cut, then design the roads to haul the logs away.

Nearby Ketchikan was booming from the construction of a large pulp mill in town, one of two in the region that had received an unprecedented 50-year timber supply to cut hundreds of millions of board feet annually from the massive Tongass National Forest. But Ketchikan had long been the heart of the Alaska Timber Industry--after World War II, loggers there cut and milled spruce and hemlock and sold lumber out of a retail yard in Anchorage during that city's boom years. It was hard to believe that there was anyone who didn't support the pulp mills and the several thousand year-round, family wage jobs they provided.

But by the 1970s the same pressures that Woodbury had seen close Minnesota forests to logging began to appear in Alaska.

"When it started here, I said 'This thing is going to grow and strangle us,'" Woodbury remembered. "It was hard for other people to see that was going to happen because we had a strong industry and a strong economy it was feeding."

Woodbury was right. Today, the industry is a fraction of its former size--Alaska Forest Association Owen Graham commented, "We've had a 90 percent decline in our industry." He's not exaggerating. Timber employment in Southeast Alaska was pegged at more than 4,000 at the industry's height in the 1980s and is now fewer than 400.

Despite figures like that, people like Woodbury and Graham insist that with a stable timber supply, the industry can regain at least some of its former strength. The instrument they...