Reflections in Blue and Green, 6

 

                           

          The Goshawk Chronicles

Evolutionary development has been extraordinarily fast on the Tongass. Cut off from the continent by mountains and glaciers, protected from north and south by its unique insularity, the Alexander Archipelago has entertained no genetic dumping. Many bird subspecies are found only here and on the coast of British Columbia: the Swainson's thrush, the Prince of Wales river otter, the Coronation Island vole, the Wrangle Island red-backed vole, the Alexander Archipelago wolf, probably the only one in North America uncorrupted by coyote genes.

The study of island biogeographybiology as a distinct product of insularity—is fruitful on the Tongass. The natural isolation afforded by thousands of rocky up-thrusts in an inland sea increases the chances of extinction, since populations are small and more vulnerable to random, or "stochastic", events like all of one species being reduced to a single sex. The smaller the population, the greater the chances of extinction.

Conservation biology, concerned with the propagation of species, has taken the concept of island biogeography and applied it on dry land, where logging has isolated what forest there is and created unnatural insularity. The spotted owl in Washington state, from this perspective, lives in what are essentially islands of old growth in seas of clear-cuts. The problem is compounded on the Tongass because clear-cuts occur on real islands. Habitat conservation areas must therefore perform their function in the midst of cutover land masses already surrounded by deep Pacific waters.

Forest Service supervisors view conservation biology the way Latin American dictators view liberation theology. Forest Service employees, including biologists, are expected, in the lapidary phrase of the supervisor in Ketchikan, "to be constructive." If he thinks a proposed cut will be more detrimental to wildlife than is legal, he told me, "I can tweak it" © make minor alterations to conform to the technicality of the law.             

The Queen Charlotte goshawk (Accipiter gentilis laingi), is endemic to Southeast and the coast of British Columbia, a unique biome composed of islands and islands within islands. It is closely related to the northern goshawk found in much of the western United States, including the Kaibab National Forest in Arizona, where a slight, bearded biologist named D. Coleman Crocker-Bedford used to work. There he conducted exhaustive studies of the acrobatic, finicky raptor that serves as a useful indicator species, and discovered that goshawks require extensive stands of densely canopied mature and old growth forests to prosper.

He advised his Forest Service supervisor in the late '80s that timber harvesting should be reduced in the Southwest to protect this and other species, and was advised by his FS superiors not to publish his findings. He did publish, and an independent scientist later praised the study as "one of the most extensive and rigorous investigations ever done into the habitat requirements of a raptorial bird." But Crocker-Bedford ended up in Ketchikan.

In 1990 he chaired an interagency group of biologists from the Forest Service and Alaska's Department of Fish and Game, the so-called "V-pop" committee, concerned with "viable populations" of wildlife. It sought to determine if requirements of the National Forest Management Act were being met on the Tongass, and the goshawk was just one of several species in doubt.

At the time a joint conference of the U.S. Congress was resolving differences over the Tongass Timber Reform Act. A draft environmental impact statement had called for a quarter of the Tongass' remaining old growth to be permanently side aside for wildlife, most of it in tracts of more than 1,000 acres and some as large as 40,000 acres, and the Forest Service wanted none of this. It lobbied individual members of Congress, informing them that wildlife could be protected while 450 million board feet were being cut every year, and Congress capitulated.

The committee on which Crocker©Bedford sat recommended maintaining old-growth "cores," wildlife transit corridors, and habitat conservation areas (HCAs) for several species. This would have curtailed, or eliminated, some logging. The regional forester in Juneau ordered a supplemental environmental impact statement prepared. (In the Forest Service, if a review displeases management, it is re©reviewed, sometimes indefinitely.) This time the committee's recommendations were rejected.                    

Crocker-Bedford resigned from the chairmanship but not from the Forest Service. In the fall of 1991 he was deposed in a suit brought by loggers in the Southwest, where his original goshawk study was being used to shut down timber sales under requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act and the Endangered Species Act. The timber companies sought to discredit the study and its author.

Being deposed was not pleasant, Crocker-Bedford told me. He was advised that he could not have his own attorney and had to be represented by a political appointee from the U.S. Attorney's office. He was interrogated for fourteen hours by the timber company lawyers attempting to discredit him, before his own attorney weighed in. 
    "He was worse than they were," said Crocker-Bedford, of the representative from Justice during the Bush administration. When Crocker-Bedford asked this lawyer what effect he thought Crocker-Bedford's ordeal would have on other wildlife biologists, on soils people and hydrologists, the lawyer said, "We know what we're doing."

The Forest Service had let the spotted owl get away from it; that wasn't going to happen with the goshawk.

Crocker-Bedford was accused of negative networking and advised to stay out of discussions of goshawk management and conservation biology. He was ordered not to attend a goshawk seminar and not to defend his study or his reputation. A colleague told him he would get a raise and more influence within the service if he discovered that clear-cuts and small trees were beneficial to wildlife.                    

  In 1992, Crocker-Bedford wrote to the chief of the service, then F. Dale Robertson: "You stated there must be no retaliation against employees who discover problems or recommend new management practices... Because the results of my Forest Service approved, careful monitoring were used in appeals and litigation, I have been subjected to repeated retaliation."

Nothing happened until after the election, when Jack Ward Thomas had been appointed and rumor had it that he would be coming to the Tongass. Service people began to say they were sorry that all those bad things had happened to Crocker-Bedford, but not that they had done them. This was not an isolated case. Many other wildlife biologists felt the chill of empirical objectives.
    One, Duane Fisher, a biologist in Juneau, had the unhappy task, in 1992, of incorporating the recommendations of the V-pop committee in the Forest Service's draft environmental impact study. Those recommendations included habitat conservation areas for the four most vulnerable species in the Tongass: bear, marten, wolf, and goshawk. If they had been adopted, the service would have been forced to set aside significantly more forest than it wished.

Fisher refused to reject the V-pop recommendations. "I came up with a high probability that a viability problem might occur in three ecological provinces out of 21," he said, in a mall outside of Juneau where I found him. "I didn't think it was that bad a risk assessment, "but my supervisor didn't like my conclusions."                  

    He wouldn't say so, but it seemed clear to me that the managers of the Tongass wanted an armor-plated forest plan, one without biological uncertainties. They had already tried to dilute the effects of logging on paper, known as "washing the data," by expanding the base under consideration to include the whole Tongass, most of which is rock, muskeg, ice and scrub, not old-growth. But mention of possible extinctions provided chinks that might later be attacked in court.

Fisher could have been ordered to change his conclusions, but that was legally risky for management. Instead, he was told to write more versions. He wrote four, and a Forest Service "writer-editor" wrote a fifth, but Fisher's boss, a road engineer, didn't like the conclusions. He rewrote the report himself, put in his own conclusions - that the forest didn't need additional wildlife habitat - and said they could cut 50 per cent of the old-growth left. So the Forest Service had two different recommendations, one tweaked on the drafting table to allow the cuts the service wanted, and another from the V-pop committee calling for big habitat conservation areas.

The V-pop committee report was again suppressed by the Forest Service. The service's second biologist in charge of the team of reviewing scientists quit in protest, as Crocker-Bedford had done, and Fisher ended up in the bureaucratic gulag with an unsatisfactory rating, pressured to take writing classes and an IQ test. He scored 122, near genius, an embarrassment for those claiming him mentally unequipped to write on the Forest Service's prescribed seventh grade level.

The real problem, of course, was what he was saying, not the way he said it. Yet another peer review was done, also by outside biologists. This one found that no recommendations so far for habitat preservation were sufficient to meet the requirements of the National Forest Management Act, an indication that Fisher's reports had in fact been thoroughly middle of the road. But Fisher was downgraded from GS12 to GS11; it was suggested that he might like to move to Yakitat, Southeast's equivalent of Omaha.                   

"I went through some rough times," he told me, without rancor. He started taking teenagers to Bible camp, umpiring at softball games after work. "That's how I coped."

  The road engineer in charge of the study of dwindling wildlife habitat on the Tongass was named Steven Brink. He was Duane Fisher's boss, and I met with him in the Juneau headquarters where the walls of the Forest Service conference room were covered with maps of the Tongass and charts of related activities and designations © prospective timber sales, set-asides, roads, wilderness, rivers, Tongass past, Tongass future. Logging was represented by black dots; much of the forest looked shot-gunned.          

"If the scientists had their way," said Brink, "we would stop logging and do a complete biological survey. That would kill the economic infrastructure in Southeast and cost $5 million a year for five years."

Better to continue to study the problem, in his view, and log at the same time. "Everything in life is a risk, including management of the forest... There is no evidence that we are having a substantial effect - threatening, or endangering - species."

As a GS14, Brink was one of the most powerful half dozen men on the Tongass, his attitude and appearance consonant with evolution within the Forest Service from the time when the long term timber contracts came into existence. Then the notion of wholesale development of America's national forests, including the building of roads into undisturbed areas, began to take on the glow of muscular philanthropy: engineers saw themselves aiding mankind, as well as harvesting a resource, producing wealth.
    They, not the foresters, rose in an agency that had previously thought of itself as primarily conservationist. But Brink's morphology was that of the hustling, midlevel corporate operative: bright paisley tie, aviator glasses, a touch of mousse, no chlorophyll tones long associated with the service. His words are chosen carefully. A scientist under his supervision was not pressured to take an IQ test and composition classes, he "was given the opportunity to improve his writing." As for the handling of the V-pop data, "if the decision makers felt I wasn't giving them all the information, they would replace me."

Brink worked for a time in Washington, D.C., learning the legal ways of the Forest Service. He was widely quoted in Alaska newspapers on the subject of habitat, using the perspective he gained in the capital: "Humans live in Northeast Washington... and survive and even reproduce, but that isn't their preferred habitat. They'd much rather live in Georgetown. Wildlife are much the same way." Brink and his colleagues had spent years building a defensible cut. Now the strategies reflected in the charts and maps around him were threatened by a bunch of biologists, and they weren't happy about it. "It's all politics," he said. "Maybe that's as it should be - politics is everything."                                                                      

The first Tongass timber sale after the APC contract cancellation totaled 61 million board feet and was 32 times the minimum bid set by the Forest Service. Senator Stevens wrote to the new forest supervisor there, urging him to continue the sizeable cut. "I appreciated our discussion on the recent petitions to list the goshawk and wolf as endangered or threatened in the Tongass. I conclude that very little study has been done related to these animals and sufficient baseline information is not yet available."
           (Next: The Chief)

My travel books, The Kingdom in the Country and Vanishing America, can be found at: http://www.fearlessbooks.com/Conaway.htm

and at:

http://www.amazon.com/Vanishing-America-Pursuit-Elusive-Landscapes/dp/B00A16UKCG

     To see my bio, click on: http://cjonwine.blogspot.com/2013/02/heres-concise-bio-for-those-who-have.html

Reflections in Blue and Green, 5

              The Senator

    He sat at a large desk in a suite of offices on the fifth floor of the Hart Building in Washington, D.C. A small man, he seemed further diminished by the Alaskana all around him - flags, baseball caps, color photographs of unblemished nature, baleen carved with native scenes. Ted Stevens, a Republican, was a member of the Interior appropriations committee and chairman of the Rules Committee and chairman of the Commerce, Science and Transportation sub-committee on federal fisheries. "Stevens gets even" had been the word on the Hill for years and stories of his rough treatment of opponents in Alaska are legion.

    Stevens was able to prevent a study of fish propagation on the Tongass, which might have limited the Forest Service cut there. He attached language to an appropriations bill instructing the Forest Service to encourage "old growth diversification projects" that would redound to the benefit of the Alaska Pulp Corporation, and to aid in a land swap to give the company federal land it occupied.  
    He also attempted in 1994 to deny funds to the Forest Service for  implementing wildlife and other environmental standards already mandated by Congress. He failed, but not quietly. "I regret," he said in a long, rancorous speech on the Senate floor, "that it is necessary once again this year to take the Senate's time to discuss issues pertaining to the Tongass National Forest."

     The amendment would have prohibited the expenditure of funds to implement what Stevens incorrectly called "brand new management practices," including habitat conservation areas he deplored. The occasional association of the fishing industry in Alaska with the conservation movement discomforts the state's long-standing extractive alliance. The PACFISH study Stevens sought to block would have increased the buffers beside streams from 100 to 300 feet.                      

    
     Most fishermen in Alaska, including the trollers that employed about one out of every 25 Alaskans, favored PACFISH, but the senator's actions were endorsed by Alaska's other senator, Frank Murkowski, chairman of Energy and Natural Resources, and by Alaska's sole congressman, Don Young, the House Natural Resources Committee chairman. This was the first time in history that all the nation's natural resources came under the aegis of politicians from a single state, and never had they been less qualified to deal with them.

     Young, during a congressional hearing, had brandished an 18-inch walrus penis while berating an Interior official for suggesting that natives should not be allowed to sell animal parts. "This is a government agency getting involved in something it shouldn't," Young had shouted.
     He regularly characterized government biologists who listed animals as endangered as "idiots" and criticized what he called "the self-centered bunch, the waffle-stomping, Harvard-graduating, intellectual bunch of idiots that don't understand that they're leading this country into environmental disaster."                     

     Young had removed the word "public" from various public lands sub-committees, and referred to Democrats as "socialists." This was pre-Monica, but retribution was definitely in the air. The balanced budget amendment would soon be passed and the government temporarily shut down; reviews of logging in the Pacific Northwest were full of acrimony, as were discussions of sport hunting in Yellowstone, national forests and parks being turned over to the states, more clear-cutting, oil exploration, and floating horizontal skyscrapers, known as cruise ships, in the Inland Passage.

     Young, Murkowski and Stevens were grounded in the politics and social rigidity of the Fifties, the decade when the Forest Service began to go wrong and the Tongass timber contracts came into existence. Their greatest opprobrium was reserved for what they called "extreme environmentalists." The time was coming, Stevens said in the Senate, "when I am going to start making some of these people tell the truth. We could have some laws passed that would put some teeth into what they can and cannot do in the Halls of Congress."

     Few issues had affected Stevens more than the cancellation of the Alaska Pulp Corporation's long-term contract. "The fact that the Sitka mill is closed shows the duplicity of the opponents," Stevens told me. "For years they have been saying we should have a more environmentally sound approach, and we have pursued that."

     His use of the possessive reflected years of championing the APC, KPC, and other commercial enterprises, with conviction. I suggested that APC and KPC had enjoyed a de facto subsidy for nearly 40 years. "Bullshit!" said the senator.
     An aide was holding his coat, since he was bound for a vote on the Senate floor. "Subsidies come out of the United States Treasury. These were competitive bids based on a concept of pricing from the past."

I pointed out that the price depended on the company's profits, and these were nonexistent on paper, according to the Forest Service's own suppressed report.

     "Horse shit!" Stevens had for years demanded and received from the Forest Service regular reports on the Tongass cut. No other senator took such an active role in the management of a single national forest, the size and magnificence of which, like the health of the things living there, made it unique.
      By now he had an arm in the coat. He gestured with the other. "It was an evolving price," he shouted. "The finances of APC have been more responsible than the federal government's."

     "Senator," said the aide. "The vote..."

     "If this generation didn't like the contract, they should have tried to rewrite it." Rewriting would have allowed APC to continue cutting trees on an exclusive, below cost basis. "Those environmentalists are..."

     "Senator..."

     "... revisionists!" And he passed beneath a 10-foot Haida totem pole, the aide still attempting to sheath his other arm.                  

     

         Next: The Goshawk Chronicles

My travel books, The Kingdom in the Country and Vanishing America, can be found at: http://www.fearlessbooks.com/Conaway.htm

and at:

http://www.amazon.com/Vanishing-America-Pursuit-Elusive-Landscapes/dp/B00A16UKCG

     To see my bio, click on: http://cjonwine.blogspot.com/2013/02/heres-concise-bio-for-those-who-have.html

Reflections in Blue and Green, 4

                                                                       

                        Admiralty Island

The DeHaviland Beaver drifted over gray whales breaching in Tenakee Inlet; a pod of killer whales rose and fell through blue-black water. Dockside at Angoon, a native village with a sizeable Anglo population, two teenagers were playing hackeysack. The sign on the wall of the aviation office said, "If it has tires or testicles, you're going to have trouble with it."

KJ stood in the stern of his skiff plowing Chatham Straight, the wind in his droopy mustache, laconically absorbing the miserable weather and the magnificence of the Admiralty Island coast. He had spent 24 years in the Forest Service, and as land use planner for Admiralty suggested to the Forest Service directors of recreation and wildlife in Washington, D.C. the need for an advocate for recreational wilderness. He was told, "'We don't have to put up with that shit anymore.'"

KJ decided conservation efforts were a waste of time. "The whole wilderness concept came out of the Forest Service—Aldo Leopold, Bob Marshall—but supervisors were evaluated on whether or not they met the timber targets, period. Information was driven in whatever direction necessary to justify what they wanted to do."

Some things he witnessed in Southeast still came back to him: slash piled to a depth of 12 feet in clear-cuts; the sound of streams buried beneath fallen trees; the sight of Caterpillars plowing rivers dark with sediment; a Forest Service engineer who, when questioned about the advisability of building roads in unstable terrain above Hobart Bay, saying, "If you can't do it, we'll find somebody who can."

A bald eagle swooped on a school of herring roiling the bottle-green surface of the awesome, in-rushing tide, and rose as a silvery silhouette. "The Tongass Timber Reform Act was unrealistic. All they wanted was the cut. If they had a good plan, they could have rewarded people for doing good work."                    

           (Next: The Senator)  

My travel books, The Kingdom in the Country and Vanishing America, can be found at: http://www.fearlessbooks.com/Conaway.htm

and at:

http://www.amazon.com/Vanishing-America-Pursuit-Elusive-Landscapes/dp/B00A16UKCG

     To see my bio, click on: http://cjonwine.blogspot.com/2013/02/heres-concise-bio-for-those-who-have.html

Reflections in Blue and Green, 3

                 Hoonah                     

Within the 52-foot salmon purse seiner's scabrous hull lies sophisticated refrigeration and navigational gear. The skipper put out confidently from Auke Bay, near Juneau, bound for Hoonah, the native settlement on Chichagof Island. He followed a course through the Saginaw Channel, around the Mansfield Peninsula, Admiralty Island, south through Lynn Channel, around Point Couverden-"a good place to soak [catch] a halibut"-and then west into Icy Straight.

Humpback whales rolled in 800 feet of water, their broad, black tails glossy under gray skies. Dall porpoises approached at speed and caromed off the prow like aquatic skateboarders. The skipper has seen it all before. He was president of United Fishermen of Alaska and the Southeast Seiners Association and testified years ago before a congressional committee about the Tongass Timber Reform Act. More emphasis should be placed on preserving fish habitat, he said.

Clear-cuts like those visible on the southern tip of Chilkat Peninsula, all part of the Tongass national forest, have a proven, ill effect upon salmon. "A lot of fishermen have worked both sides of this issue—hauled logs, done time at the mill. “They're sensitive about putting people out of jobs. But it's real hard nowadays to fish salmon and not be some kind of environmentalist."

Fishing and processing fish employed more people in Alaska in the 1990s than any other commercial activity, and the natural lamination of the industry to the conservation movement discomforted the state's longstanding extractive alliance. But Sen. Ted Stevens, ranking Republican on the Interior appropriations committee, blocked a study of salmon reproduction, known as PACFISH, on the Tongass, attaching a separate rider to the appropriations bill. 
    The study would have increased the buffers along streams from 100 to 300 feet. Fishermen in Alaska opposed Stevens's rider, including the trollers who employed about one out of every 25 Alaskans, but Stevens's actions were endorsed by Alaska's other, former Republican senator, Frank Murkowski, by Con. Don Young, and by the former governor who “still doesn't know the difference between trawlers and trollers. His aids try to tell him. It's like listening to Lenny Bruce teach Lyndon Johnson to say 'Negro.'"
             

Hoonah was a Tlinget village with a dock high enough to accommodate 20-foot tides, dusty streets, and a medley of well-used and abandoned machinery. Beyond little bungalows built in the '40s were some of the most extensive clear-cuts in Southeast, the dun-colored progeny of the regional native corporation, Sealaska. Native business enterprises had to conform only to the state's notoriously lax, rarely enforced environmental restraints. They had done more damage to the landscape than their mainstream rivals and had taken advantage of tax loopholes to sell debt to other, larger corporations. This led to the logging of otherwise unsullied Admiralty Island by the likes of Disney.

The Tlinget did not like talking about this. The local member of the regional council wasn’t available, and neither was a tribal elder practicing ceremonial dance. Two people who would talk were Gertrude and Bill, she Tlinket, he Haida, who lived together in what might be called a subsistent relationship. "This logging is detestable," she said, and had opposed it for years. "But the people are afraid to speak out."

Natives were no more in control of their corporations than Anglos were of theirs, a surprise to me. She and Hanlon thought the Forest Service intimidated those opposed to logging through its public hearings, which could be technical and contentious, thus enhancing the cut. Bill added, "The Forest Service and Sealaska are in collusion. They play on that fear."

His conversation, like his library, was sprinkled with books about the CIA and the KGB. The conspiratorial bent dated him, as did his graying ponytail. Remnants of east coast-west coast tensions in this remote place were surprising. The couple’s travels indicated the long reach of Native American activism—Washington, D.C., Mexico City, even Libya; they talked of "peoples' courts" for native Alaskans, autonomous cells within the over-arching polity of national forest, state and country, all of them thoroughly white. Native sovereignty, the latest demand in the ongoing unease between the populations in Alaska, asked new concessions and drove some white Alaskans wild.                

The Alaskan Native Claims Settlement Act was supposed to have resolved all that with money and 44 million acres. Almost 700,000 acres went to natives in Southeast, including some of the best trees on the Tongass, and in one decade 500,000 of those acres have been logged, an unimaginable vastness.

The shacks remained in Hoonah, and a new Forest Service headquarters rose with a view of the native-driven clear-cuts shackling mountains like granite pushpins thrust into clouds. Few jobs on the high, tide-tugged dock or in the lumber camps across the bay went to natives, but there were the dividends. All natives received them, even those opposed to their corporations which were going after the timber freed up by the cancellation of the APC contract.                      

The logged land had the best trees and the best of everything else that contributed to subsistence living. "I hate that word," said Gertrude. She held up a basket made from beaten spruce roots, which were disappearing from lowlands dried out by logging. "Every day of my life I deal with the land, for medicine, food, art. I can't live without it."

Her father and brothers traced ever-widening arcs on the Tongass, searching for game beyond the reach of armed sports from Juneau and the logging camps who drove the new roads looking for easily-blastable Sitka black-tail deer. But her freezer was full: venison, luminous frozen fish, containers of salmon berries, blueberries, gray berries, strawberries, cranberries, silk berries. 

    For dinner there were slabs of broiled salmon steak with dried seaweed — "Tlinget popcorn" — beach asparagus, coffee and more coffee, while in a corner stood canoe paddles, mementoes rather than tools, one carved with an eagle holding a dog salmon in its beak.             

           (Next: Admiralty Island)

 My travel books, The Kingdom in the Country and Vanishing America, can be found at: http://www.fearlessbooks.com/Conaway.htm

and:

http://www.amazon.com/Vanishing-America-Pursuit-Elusive-Landscapes/dp/B00A16UKCG

     To see my bio, click on: http://cjonwine.blogspot.com/2013/02/heres-concise-bio-for-those-who-have.html

Reflections in Blue and Green, 2

                              

                               The Deal

It had been going on since the end of World War II. As Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers in the Pacific after World War II, Gen. MacArthur, eager to see Japan's government and industry restored, put into effect some draconian measures. Among them was the dismantling of the zaibatsus, the powerful, interlocking government, banking and industrial entities that ran Japan before Pearl Harbor and were credited with nudging the country into conflict. 
    The rise of labor unions there led MacArthur to lift restrictions on Japanese business, part of official United States policy to encourage opposition to Communism that included covert financing by the Central Intelligence Agency of the rightist Liberal Democratic Party in Japan.

An obscure figure named Tadao Sasyama, who had helped liquidate the zaibatsus, was made head of the Forest Resources General Countermeasures Council in Japan, to bring timber to that country, whose forest reserves had been halved. Sasayama was told by General Headquarters in Tokyo that cheap timber might be found on distant, dimly-envisioned Alaskan shores, where the head forester was in search of a market, and that the forester and his government were willing to make a sweetheart deal.

This was Japan's first venture abroad after the war, and a contract was issued in 1953 to the newly-created Alaska Lumber and Pulp Co., Inc. that became Alaska Pulp Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Alaska Pulp Co. Ltd., based in Tokyo. A second, similar contract went to the Ketchikan Pulp Company, a subsidiary of the thoroughly American Louisiana Pacific, with very little risk capital required by obliging American officials.

More than 100 Japanese companies and individuals had a stake in the Alaska Pulp Corporation, backed by the Japanese government and its directors who were none other than the principals of the Forest Resources General Countermeasures Council, with the shadowy Sasayama again in charge. The pulp mill was built at Sitka in 1957, and later a sawmill at Wrangle, both in Southeast Alaska. There were several 50-year contracts, the final one to run from 1961 through 2011, and they say volumes about the government's ideas of inexhaustible old-growth timber and the benevolence of corporations.

Five billion board feet were to feed the symbol of the new, vital, competitive Japan. The original deal allowed the APC and the Ketchikan Pulp Company (KPC), to pay only a fraction of the value of the timber for 10 years, on the assumption that the price would eventually rise with the market. It never did. But let the Forest Service tell it: "The development of APC was based on the architecture of pre-war Zaibatsu," wrote the authors of a study prepared by the Forest Service in 1987, the Alaska Pulp Corporation Validation Report, known simply as the Zaibatsu Report. "The offering of APC stock was designed to embrace all of the leading companies dealing in timber products."                    

The Forest Service's study indicated that APC was set up to distribute assets to its Japanese associates and never intended to make money. Any profits attained by APC were available for distribution to the Japanese shareholders who "were the very individuals [to which] APC sold the products acquired from its subsidiary companies," not genuine trading entities but representatives of "the modern-day Zaibatsu Groups."

The advantage of this lay in the price for Tongass timber paid by the companies. APC, like KPC, had exclusive rights to inexpensive timber in return for operating the pulp mill; the so-called "free market price" of future stumpage was pegged to profits. But through its interlocking network of Japanese controlled timber and mill operations, chemical fiber, pulp and paper companies and their subsidiaries, APC distributed the proceeds from Sitka spruce, hemlock and pine until there was no revenue left, hence no requirement to reimburse the American taxpayer.

These purchases were not "arm's length" transactions as required by law but instead kept the price paid by both APC and KPC for Tongass timber well below market value. About one thousand board feet cost the Japanese about what a hamburger cost and never climbed to more than three dollars, whereas independent operators paid on average between $40 and $60 and sometimes much more. In extreme cases, the pulp mills paid as little as $1.40 for prime Sitka spruce used in making quality musical instruments that was worth $3,000 on the open market.

   Forest Service accounting practices were no match for the sophisticated APC operation, had the Forest Service been interested in thwarting it. The service's pricing formulas were irrelevant, starting with the artificial selling value and then subtracting manufacturing costs, harvesting costs, a profit and risk allowance that guaranteed APC an additional 12 per cent to 18 per cent profit. Only then did it reach the bottom of the pricing barrel where stumpage rates were set.

The Forest Service did not act on its own recommendations in the Zaibatsu Report for correcting all this, nor did it release the report to the public. Today the Forest Service will not even admit to its existence. After the 1992 election, the Forest Service did begin to make adjustments in APC's access to Tongass Timber, yet at the time the zaibatsu report appeared, the remainder of the APC contract was still valued at about $800 million. It is impossible to say how much money had been taken off the Tongass by APC and KPC since the Fifties. The mills had paid essentially one price for timber, while its real value rose almost 3,000 per cent, more than any other commodity on earth.                     

The chairman of APC, George Ishiyama, born in America, graduated from UCLA in 1936 with a degree in economics but retained close contacts in Japan. After the war he acted as middleman in America and Australia for the transportation of raw materials to Japan, and later became American adviser to the Industrial Bank of Japan. Although he owned a home in Palo Alto, he spent most of his time in Tokyo. He took over the presidency and chairmanship of the board of APC in 1983; because he had been a friend of the founder, he said, he would take no salary.

Two years later he spoke of APC's "financial hemorrhage" due to difficulties in obtaining timber from the Forest Service on an "economic basis" and requirements to improve the quality of waste water from the Sitka mill going into Silver Bay. At the time, the company was in acrimonious negotiations with the United Paperworkers International over wages, benefits and working conditions, all of which had been declining for years. APC had been convicted of conspiring with the Ketchikan Pulp Company to restrain trade and had steadily obtained concessions from its own workers in the process. Despite its public contention with the Forest Service over the price and supply of logs, the company continued to entertain ranking Forest Service brass at Japan House in Sitka. But it was in the environmental realm that APC attracted the most attention.

In 1989, the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation charged the mill with violating terms of a permit for a solid waste landfill by dumping excessive sludge from the mill. Masses of this organic waste product from the pulping process regularly appeared on the surface of Silver Bay, along with discharges of gas from waste decomposing on the bottom. In 1990, the United States Environmental Protection Agency looked into APC's disposal of its fly ash, which was contaminated with dioxin and other toxic substances. This went into the air, into the landfill and into the bay, after being mixed with waste water and flushed directly through the mill's sewage system.

In 1991, the company allowed 15,000 gallons of acid known "red liquor," another by-product, to flow directly into the bay. The EPA fined the company $432,000 for violating federal toxic substance, hazardous waste, and reporting laws, but APC's environmental problems continued. In September, 1993, the EPA charged APC with violations of clean air standards, and a few days later a spokesman for the mill announced that it was closing.                      

George Ishiyama had been in charge for a decade. APC faced flat prices for its pulp, a reluctance by the new administration in Washington to go along with the company's continuing demands for undervalued timber, court challenges from conservation groups over its timber cutting, lawsuits by former employees, and a possible environmental disaster. The closing eliminated 400 jobs in a city of about 8,500 people and violated the terms of the long-term contract. The company's offer to convert the mill for the manufacture of medium density fiberboard, which required fewer workers and less pollutants, and to renegotiate its agreement with the Forest Service, was denied, and the 50-year contract cancelled by the Clinton administration.

APC threatened to file a claim in federal court for compensation from a government that had heavily subsidized it for so long. The company claimed a total operating loss of $163 million on the mill, $31 million of that in the previous fiscal year. But in 1992 the Forest Service had lost $23 million on the Tongass by its own calculations, and $64 million by outside estimates, the largest such deficit in Forest Service history. The following year the service ran up an even greater loss. How both the service, and APC, could be losing money on so much exported timber and timber products puzzled more than a few people.

Then in May, 1994, during preliminary proceedings in a lawsuit brought by a former APC employee, revelations about Ishiyama's finances emerged: he had received a $20.7 million bonus in 1993, the same year APC claimed losses of $31 million. The money came from one of APC's subsidiaries, AP Financial, Inc. It was further revealed that Ishiyama was also chairman of Japan Resources Corp. and its subsidiaries, Japan Resources Ltd. and JR Financial Inc., all heavily involved with APC. Somehow the chairman of APC, during the decade when his company was supposedly suffering great financial problems and the Forest Service's Tongass's operation producing unprecedented flows of red ink, had created a stock empire.                   
                      (Next: Hoonah)                 

 My travel books, The Kingdom in the Country and Vanishing America, can be found at: http://www.fearlessbooks.com/Conaway.htm

and:

http://www.amazon.com/Vanishing-America-Pursuit-Elusive-Landscapes/dp/B00A16UKCG

     To see my bio, click on: http://cjonwine.blogspot.com/2013/02/heres-concise-bio-for-those-who-have.html

                       

Reflections in Blue and Green, Part 1

    I spent two weeks in summer in Southeast Alaska years ago and stumbled into a fight among environmentalists, the Forest Service, polluters, and Japanese investors that resonated like no other. It's a complicated story not published before, about a gorgeous place and a dark legacy going all the way back to World War II. This is the first installment:                                        

          There's a Tongass among us and you should know about it...

                                            The Place

   The coastal mountains — radical tectonic up-thrusts — are dimly perceptible through the clouds, with dark faults in the snowcaps, and sudden bursts of immense green conifer- forested slopes. Seen from the air, muskeg flats reflect the sky like mirror shards, and bright, braided streams feed the azure inland extension of the Pacific Ocean. Rocky beaches are defined by some geometric accumulation that gradually reveals itself to be logs, thousands of them, an endless littoral of sear, bleached Sitka spruce, hemlock and cedar.

   Tongass: the word resonates like struck bronze. Some years ago I flew to southeastern Alaska to look into the extraordinary business arrangement involving the Tongass National Forest and a Japanese conglomerate, intrigued by the contradictions: foreigners taking spruce and hemlock from public lands that Americans were not entitled to and paying a lot less for the privilege than it was worth. What's more, this had been going on for half a century, a period during which the most profound social and technological changes had occurred in America, including the triumphs of the environmental movement, with federal agencies rendered accountable through science and the courts and a global perception affected about the fragility of species and resources. But "up here" was a place sprinkled with old growth where the past was still being played out and through which ran powerful strands of the culture.

  The United States Forest Service was and still is responsible for more than 100 million acres throughout the United States. The question had arisen: How can this federal agency consistently go against the wisdom of its own experts, and the desires of most of its citizens, in the aftermath of the debacles of the northern spotted owl and the Exxon Valdez? One answer lay in the Tongass, the largest of our national timberlands as well as the largest temperate rain forest on earth, a concern of such disparate personalities as William Henry Seward, John Muir, Teddy Roosevelt, and Gen. Douglas T. MacArthur. Full of biological promise, it was being cut and virtually given away, the word “Tongass” appearing now and then in news stories about other places and issues as members of Congress sought to link logging on the Tongass to unrelated legislation, when no other national forest received such treatment.

The word itself is Tlingit for a smallish tribe south of Ketchikan but denotes most of the Alexander Archipelago, that sloping handle of southeast Alaska fused to British Columbia by glaciers and deep valleys. Essentially an oceanic phenomenon, the Tongass' 17 million acres contain the world's largest concentration of bears so packed with salmonoid protein that they dwarf their grizzly cousins in Canada and Montana, a distinct sub-species of wolf, plentiful stocks of fish like those that once crowded the Columbia and Snake rivers, and birds of prey winging over the threshold of the Endangered Species Act.

  The Tongass National Forest, created in 1907 by T.R. himself, was as part of his larger, radical conservation efforts. Shortly thereafter the U.S. Forest Service, eager to put the saw to its prime commodity, promoted the idea of pulp mills on the Tongass, encouraged by a territorial government dreaming of economic development and statehood. There begins a cautionary tale of official naivete and mismanagement, of public and private greed, of dishonesty and illegality on a scale fittingly grand, one of the more disastrous collisions of nature and civilization. The tale is rooted in Washington, D.C., and in Tokyo, as well as Alaska, and extends into the moment as Congress considers—again and again—the notion of our dwindling commons.

                      Sitka                  

The dyspeptic Volkswagon Rabbit had no muffler. There were large cracks in the windshield; only one wiper worked. The union man piloted this noisesome ruin toward Silver Bay, near Sitka, through the gathering twilit gloom. He had been a millwright in machinery maintenance at the Alaska Pulp Corporation (APC) and spokesman for Local 962 of the International Paperworkers when it struck the mill in Sitka back in 1986, before the strike was broken with the use of outside labor. He testified in Washington, D.C. before a House sub-committee in favor of the Tongass Timber Reform Act, and criticized APC.

"When I got back, I was sitting in the Nugget with my wife,” he said, “and this scab tapped me on the shoulder. He said, 'Hey, dude, you're fighting a losing battle.' The phone threats started right after that—dirty names, comments hard to remember. The back window of my Dodge was broken, then the side windows were shot out. I started stashing guns around the house. I don't know if I'll ever be able to stop that."

He had blue eyes and a piratical squint. A supporter of the Tongass Timber Reform Act when it still contained language that would have ended Congress's automatic appropriations to APC, he asked the congressmen during public testimony, "Why should the workers at the Sitka mill subsidize the lobbying and other activities of the Industrial Bank of Japan, when they are already being subsidized by the U.S. government under the 50-year contract? How many times must we pay these people to come in and take our timber?"

He was not allowed to return to work at APC’s mill and, according to him, black-listed everywhere in town. But he refused to leave. He filed lawsuits and appeals relating to APC that left him an expert in industrial effluent, international finance, civil law, the National Labor Relations Board, and the Racketeer Influence and Corrupt Organizations Act, as well as broke.

Among his possessions were photographs of dingy waste water pouring from a large pipe into the bay, canning jars full of dark fluids eating holes in the metal lids, and many documents. A letter he wrote to the Sitka Daily Sentinel on the subject of honor included the question: "Is Japan being misrepresented by a few self-serving, greedy individuals? ... If the answer is no, then I say to my beloved state of Alaska and the United States of America, 'Beware of Japan. Her offer of friendship is but a Trojan horse that once taken in will open to plunder our vast resources...'"

Metal towers reared on the edge of the bay, in a soggy staging area paved with compacted fly ash. In the six-story "digestors" wood chips had not many months before been mixed with sulfuric acid and steam, and cooked to break down the glue holding the fibers together, releasing tannin and lignin. The “red liquor” had to be massively evaporated, and during the multi-stage wash process vast amounts of lye and steam were used to produce a substance resembling gray toilet paper—pulp—bathed repeatedly in chlorine. Rivers of waste went into the bay while a deathly white, paper-thin substance emerged from the line in rolls half as big as boxcars, most of it shipped abroad for the manufacture of cellophane and other synthetics.

Nothing emerged from the stacks now; the log boom on the surface of the bay contained none of the brown froth in the photographs. "The chairman of APC cried poor for years," said the union man, over the rumble of his engine. "He said he needed concessions, yet he was dabbling in stocks with a $187 million investment fund. His collateral was these trees. He knew what was coming—lawsuits, EPA judgements. The question is, did he leave toxic substances here? Will the mill go bankrupt and the feds have to pay for cleaning it up?"

The Russians called Sitka New Archangel. Here the sale of Alaska to America was formalized by Secretary of State Seward, not far from the cemetery harboring the remains of early Russian traders and their Orthodox church. Sitka reminded me of Maine— a thicket of masts in the marina, diminutive wooded islands bobbing in the sound, passengers from a Princess cruise ship wandering Lincoln Street in pastel jumpsuits protected by clear plastic.                     

   The sign in the Old Harbor Bookstore said, "Please don't drip on the books."

The Backdoor cafe drew a polyglot assemblage of fishermen, students, and seven members of the Sitka Conservation Society. Two wore beards and one a bow tie, hardly a revolutionary cell, and yet I had been told by a Forest Service official in Juneau, "I'm surprised that bookstore hasn't been fire-bombed."

One of the owners worked for the mill as an analytical chemist in the Seventies but quit because he "felt like an accomplice in the damage." He opened the bookstore, and the mill forbade its employees to buy books there because the owner was quoted in the newspaper criticizing the mill's emissions. After the announcement of the cancellation of the long-term contract, he received a Fax wishing him dead; the police chief called to ask if he had yet received a letter bomb.

A mechanical engineer who also worked at the mill said, "We were using 2 million pounds of chlorine a month. It went into the air and the water." A Forest Service study, later cancelled by the Forest Service, discovered that no lichens existed on trees within a half-mile of the mill, and no normal lichen growth within 13 miles. Fish caught near the out-fall pipe from the mill were not to be touched, much less eaten. Mooring cables were sheathed in wood fiber. "Visibility in the water had been reduced by 90 per cent."

The company blamed this on muskeg run-off, or "glacier flower"—sediment from melting glaciers. The Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation had allowed the mill to operate without a permit for four years and had never made APC meet the state's already lax standards. One of those meeting in the Back Door “got cranked,” as he put it, and brought the class action nuisance suit against the Alaska Pulp Corporation for polluting that forced the revelations about the finances of the chairman, one George Ishiyama.

The plaintiff’s attorney had worked on the case for almost three years and estimated that APC had violated the Clean Water Act 2,000 times and had been in continuous violation of the Clean Air Act since 1978. In the attorney's view, the long-term contracts to the Alaska Pulp Company and the Ketchikan Pulp Company provided a shocking example of government making an imprudent decision and then being taken advantage of. The real victim was the taxpayer. At a hearing conducted by the state on the prospect of converting the mill to fiberboard manufacture, the plaintiff asked some pertinent questions about particulate in the air. "The next day my car at the harbor had two windows smashed," he said, "and a big gash cut in the metal."

While I was in Sitka the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation listed the mill as one of Alaska's 10 most polluted sites. I called up the mill to ask about this and other things, and a few minutes later received a call back, not from Sitka, but from Seattle. A man identifying himself as an outside director of APC said, "I'm not prepared to get into a deposition-like conversation," provided me with a Fax number, and hung up.

Already the mill's governors had slipped away. The newspaper ran a stock photo of wrinkly old Ishiyama; the city administrator spoke of him as a kind of corporate Shroud of Turin that had removed itself permanently to the far side of the cold Pacific. The company had been active for years in the municipal life of Sitka, providing amenities like a playing field at the public school. The city administration blamed environmental activists in Washington and Alaska for closing the mill and seemed unconcerned about possible environmental depravation.

Tourism, Alaska's fastest growing commercial enterprise, does not value clear-cuts and dirty bays; it’s a factor in Sitka's economy, and the mill closing had not significantly affected the city's population or the value of its real estate. Another employer of note in Sitka was the Forest Service, which had assisted APC for years and was being pressured by Alaska's congressional delegation to keep up the cut on the Tongass.
   The Forest Service spent most of its money on subsidizing logging, mining, and grazing, and during the approximate half-century of the APC and KPC contracts had become increasingly compartmentalized, its professionals encouraged to move from one forest to another, where few saw the results of their actions. The service was at that time lurching in reaction to public demands for reform, its problems compounded by massive fires in the West, the implications of the Endangered Species Act, and the wishes of the public to see preserved some of irreplaceable landscapes.                      

  The diminutive octagonal Russian fort on a hill behind Sitka was a pretty reminder of a once-mighty presence. The pulp mill squatting on the far side of town, however, parodied contemporary developmental ambitions, its indelible print in the industrial detritus the union man spoke of: fly ash under various roads and in the woods, on the bottom of the bay a mat of anaerobic fibers, decomposing logs and pulp, and snarls of cable.

Superfund scientists later went to Sitka, rented a 60-foot boat with a downrigger, and cruised Silver Bay, collecting samples from the bottom with dredging gear. They also collected at the mill site. The samples were sent to a laboratory in Seattle, but the outcome was uncertain. Proclaiming a Superfund site involved public listings, public comment, and various maneuvers within the EPA that could take years. Meanwhile a Republican Congress came to power that was not sympathetic to the EPA's mission.

The class action lawsuit brought by the former APC employee never went to trial. APC agreed to a settlement before the charges could be publicly aired whereby the company would contribute $2 million to benefit educational and cultural projects in Sitka. One recipient was to be the high school, where a program would be set up, with astounding cynicism, to "encourage young men and women to explore and pursue the study of science and the environment."

   Then APC filed a lawsuit against the Forest Service for canceling the long-term contract. The corporation that had fed off the Tongass for half a century wanted another billion dollars. The EPA was still looking into the mess the company left, the end product of the long, incestuous love affair between the Forest Service and the timber industry in Alaska. One local antagonist summed it up: "The Forest Service more or less gave APC trees, paid them to cut them and take them out of the country, and then sell them to themselves."                  

     

             (Next: The Deal)

  My travel books, The Kingdom in the Country and Vanishing America, can be found at: http://www.fearlessbooks.com/Conaway.htm

and:
http://www.amazon.com/Vanishing-America-Pursuit-Elusive-Landscapes/dp/B00A16UKCG
     To see my bio, click on: http://cjonwine.blogspot.com/2013/02/heres-concise-bio-for-those-who-have.html