The Book of the Tongass
by Carolyn Servid

Travel Guidebook Series

Ecotourism Books

Amazon.com
Lacing across the cold fjords and salmon streams of southeastern Alaska, the Tongass is America's largest national forest, larger than the state of West Virginia. It is also little known beyond the immediate region, and its obscurity has been of much use to the timber companies that, operating with the federal government's permission, have for years been clearing huge sections of the old-growth rainforest--and, it seems, for trivial ends. "Think of the stately Sitka spruce and you think of Chopin and sounding boards in the world's finest pianos," writes coeditor Don Snow, "but in the same thought you must also make room for the cellophane that wraps packages of cigarettes. Think of the soft-needled western hemlock and the strength it offers to hold a house together, but at the same time, consider rayon." It is possible, Snow and his fellow contributors maintain, to work this vast forest without wide-scale destruction, to log it in sustainable ways; so the native people of the Tongass have been doing for generations. But it is necessary, they add, to think of the Tongass and other old-growth forests for what they have to offer the future, as vast libraries of biological information, instead of a resource for short-term profits. This book takes readers deep inside the forest, giving an account of its natural wealth. It also guides them through the thickets of law and economics surrounding the public-lands forestry industry. Activists will find it of much value for its clear explication of the ongoing debate surrounding how the Tongass is to be used.

Book Description
In the southeast corner of America's most rugged state lies the last contiguous expanse of temperate rain forest on the planet, much of it within the Tongass National Forest. With Glacier Bay at its northern end, the Tongass lies on a maze of islands and along a coastal strip protected by a range of mountains. The Tongass lives up to its state's reputation for wildness, natural beauty, and battles over how the land has been and will be used. In The Book of the Tongass, 13 Alaskans describe the region's spectacular forest and wildlife, its economic opportunities, and in two pieces by Tlingit storytellers, its oral history.

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