News: Firsthand

		Suggestions
		Here are two things you can do right now to help keep the Tongass intact: Speak out Donate to our Tongass Campaign
		Scrapbook
		Some pictures from my trip: We toured the Tongass on the Mist Cove with The Boat Company, run by NRDC Honorary Trustee Michael McIntosh and his wife, Winsome, who have dedicated much of their lives to protecting this wilderness. We navigated through ice-filled waters surrounded by towering mountains. Both land and water teemed with life. Here, a bear makes its way through the grass across the stream.
		Resources
		The Environmental Legend and the Real Tongass - another personal take on the Tongass Tongass National Forest - visitor information and more from the U.S. Forest Service Temperate Rainforests - overview from the David Suzuki Foundation

This summer I returned with my husband, John, NRDC's founder, to the Tongass National Forest in southeast Alaska, the site of one of my first NRDC trips 27 years ago. On the surface, not that much has changed. Today as then, the Tongass still appears, as it did to John Muir, "in the morning of creation."

We traveled through the southeast archipelago, which stretches forever through deep fjords, massive glaciers and endless forests, with a group of NRDC trustees and staff as well as people who are concerned about the fate of the Tongass. As we started out into this last substantially intact temperate rainforest, we knew we were in a land of abundance. Whales spouted and dived before our boat with their fluked tails seeming to wave in greeting. Porpoises leapt and raced alongside us. Once a startled seal popped up with a salmon clenched in his mouth, his whiskers quivering.

The morning we anchored in Sitkoh Bay, a group of us gathered our fly rods and hiked up a clear stream to look for rainbow trout. The stream was narrow and clear and we had to keep a good distance between us so as not to scare the fish. Our guide left me where a moss-covered log had created a shelter for trout and I was happy to have a good stretch of water to myself.

As I tied a fly onto my line, I looked up at the hemlock and Sitka spruce towering hundreds of feet above. Patches of sunlight broke through the high canopy, making the green moss on the fallen log almost glow. Behind me in the forest, ferns rose to the height of my shoulders and devil's club, a tall plant with broad green leaves and covered with sharp thorns, created a tangled barrier. Fish darted in the clear water and although I could not see them, I knew there were animals near--squirrels chattered, there was movement in the leaves and we had passed fresh bear scat as we came up the stream.

For the first time I was alone in this wilderness. Not absolutely alone, but distant enough from the others to recognize my vulnerability. I felt the power of nature, which surrounded me there as I stood in the stream. I was a small visitor to a giant land. To be alone, even for a short time, in the presence of such power in this great forest was sublime. I have to admit, it was also scary.

I experienced this same sense of fear and reverence when we motored up Endicott Arm towards Dawes Glacier. Our small boat moved between steep granite mountain slopes that plunged straight into the deep water. Icebergs sloshed and rippled around our skiff as harbor seals slid from them, disappearing into darkness.

A persistent whisper of wind flowed off the glacier, a reminder of eternal coldness. Deep rumblings came from this powerful river of ice where large chunks break off, creating tidal waves for miles down the fjord. The 2000-foot-high blue-green wall of ice towered above us. It was the face of a glacier that stretched hundreds of miles back into the mountains. This was earth in the making.

The Tongass is like the forests our forebears met when they first came to America. With its grandeur is also the darkness, the fear and the impersonal natural forces of water and ice. This is something we have lost except in the grand scale of the Tongass.

Standing alone in the stream and feeling the wind off the glacier reminded me that we are not masters of nature but are a part of nature. In the Tongass, the power of nature is still the greatest force. It is a land of grand proportions. Over a thousand islands cover an area roughly eight times the size of Yellowstone National Park. It has the highest coastal range of mountains in the world that holds the largest ice mass on the North American continent. It has some of the largest fish runs and the biggest concentration of bald eagles.

It is a land of superlatives but it is more than that. The Tongass is one of the few places on earth that is so wild, so scenic and so vast. It is a wilderness that we cannot afford to lose.

The fact that the integrity of the Tongass still exists is a monument to stewards of the past, but we need stewards today. The Bush administration is seeking ways to open up this forest to clear-cut logging by eliminating the Roadless Rule to allow road construction for logging on millions of acres. Bills have been proposed to waive environmental laws that protect the complex relationships of the millions of plants, animals and fish there. We are lucky to have Sharon Buccino, NRDC's senior attorney and program director for land and forests, leading the fight to thwart plans to open up this national treasure to intense logging. To divide this national treasure with logging roads and clear-cutting is to destroy the essence of one of nature's greatest wildernesses.

It was misty the last morning as I stood on the deck and looked at the sea stretching endlessly between steep mountains capped with ice and snow. It was quiet except for the sound of lapping water and the occasional call of an eagle. "Civilization" was not visible in any direction--it was an eternal land of serenity and power.

We must take a stand to keep this great wilderness intact.

December 2006