Timber and Tongass: can old wounds heal?

• Author: Bonham, Nicole A.
• Position: Logging in the Tongass National Forest

It's with long history that various groups meet to give the collaborative stewardship concept a swing. Each is hoping the process can help them mold forest-management decisions to something they feel suits Southeast's future while protecting the environment, the timber base, fishing stocks....

Collaborative Stewardship. It's an age-old theory posed to resolve contemporary differences. Bring a diverse group of folks to the table. Discuss the options. Define a goal. Then haggle out a tolerable compromise to work together.

Of course, it's never that easy. Especially when the players are already polarized, scarred from years of ongoing battle. But that is exactly what's afoot on the public forestlands, specifically in the nation's largest forest: Alaska's controversial, 17-million-acre Tongass.

The Tongass has historically fed most of the sawmills in Southeast. It is managed under the U.S. Forest Service's Tongass Land Management Plan, established in 1979. TLMP was revised in 1997 after a 10-year planning effort that involved the drafting of three environmental impact statements and preliminary plans. Those drafts, which were submitted for public review in 1990, 1991 and 1996, drew more than 30,000 public comments.

Under the revised plan, land-use designations were drastically changed from the peninsula being widely available for timber harvest, to its southern region now being largely protected against roads and logging. According to Jack Phelps, executive director of the Alaska Forest Association, the revised TLMP outlines 676,000 acres of land available for harvest, down substantially from the approximate 2 million acres once available for eventual harvest.

"(Government) is trying to account for every other use of the forest at the expense of timber," said Phelps, voicing industry's side of the argument. The continued controversy makes application of TLMP (with its 33 appeals) difficult.

ENTER COLLABORATIVE STEWARDSHIP

Representatives from industry, the environmental community, and local, state and federal government met together last spring in Ketchikan-long considered ground-zero in the forest-management debate-to apply the theory of negotiation locally.

With a two-day workshop behind them, they set forth on a path of renewed enthusiasm to go to the table together and hammer out an acceptable application of the new and hard-won management plan for the Tongass.

What has resulted so far is natural: some projects seemingly headed for success...