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For information on the Harriman Retraced Expedition e-mail: harriman2001@science.smith.edu |
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I live in the town of Sitka,
which is on the outer coast of Baranof Island in southeast
Alaska. Unlike the Tlingit and Haida people, I am not Native
here. But since I first set foot in Sitka about twenty years
ago, I have rooted my soul in this place and committed
myself to it, like a kind of marriage. Baranof Island is a rugged spine
of mountains about 100 miles long and up to 25 miles wide,
cleaved by many large, fjordlike bays. Sitka is located on
the island's west side facing the open Pacific, partly
sheltered by a skein of small islands and surf-pounded
rocks. The only other modern settlement on this 1,600 square
mile island is the tiny fishing village of Port Alexander,
down near the southern tip. The entire island is a homeland
to Tlingit people, who have hunted, fished, and gathered
here for thousands of years. Sitka's original Tlingit name
is Shee Atika, meaning "The Outside of Baranof Island." In
1799, Russians began colonizing Sitka, and they eventually
made it the capital of Russian America. The newcomers were
attracted by an abundance of sea otters, which were hunted
for their extremely valuable fur; but after a few decades of
overharvesting the sea otters were gone, Russian interests
in this part of the world dwindled, and in 1867 arrangements
were made to sell the entire Alaska Territory to the United
States. Ceremonies marking the transfer of ownership took
place on Castle Hill in Sitka. When John Muir and his
companions from the Harriman Alaska Expedition visited in
1899, Sitka was still Alaska's capital, but just a year
later the seat of government moved to Juneau, where it has
remained ever since. Today Sitka is a modern American
community with about 8,700 residents. About 20 percent of
the people are Tlingit Indians, who still hold strongly to
many of their traditional social and ceremonial traditions,
adding a rich and vital element to community life. The town
stretches along about 20 miles of shoreline road with
turnarounds at either end. This means travel in and out of
Sitka is only by boat or airplane, creating a sense of
isolation and separateness that is much favored by many
folks who live here. Sitka is one of Alaska's largest
commercial fishing ports. The three harbors are jammed with
boats&emdash;trollers, seiners, and longliners -- variously
geared for taking salmon, halibut, cod, rockfish, and
herring. Around 70 million pounds of fish are offloaded from
fishing boats here every year. Over the past ten years,
sport fishermen have swarmed to Sitka (and other southeast
Alaska communities), spawning a tremendous increase in the
number of charter fishing boats. Until recently, the timber
industry was dominant in Sitka's economy. During the 1950s,
the U.S. government sought to boost southeast Alaska's
economy through a program of intense logging within the
Tongass National Forest. Wood from large timber operations
supplied two pulp mills -- the Japanese-owned Alaska Pulp
Company in Sitka and the Louisiana Pacific Corporation's
mill in Ketchikan. Thick mats of pulp produced in the Sitka
mill were shipped to Japan, where they were used mostly to
manufacture rayon and cellophane. The Tongass National Forest
contains some of the largest stands of old-growth temperate
rainforest left anywhere on earth, but by the 1980s, as many
as 28,000 acres were being clear-cut each year to supply the
mills. Citizens from Alaska and other states criticized this
logging as taxpayer-subsidized destruction of a precious
resource, but many others felt that cutting timber from the
Tongass was an important way to provide jobs and promote
economic development in southeast Alaska. Although the pulp mill was
Sitka's largest employer, residents found themselves in
conflict not only over clear-cutting in the Tongass but also
over air and water pollution from the mill. This was a
darkly divisive period in Sitka's history, but the situation
changed dramatically when declining pulp markets, high
operating costs, and antiquated equipment led to the mill's
closure in 1993. While loss of the pulp mill caused serious
hardship for many individuals and families, retraining
programs and federal relief funds helped to soften the blow.
And to everyone's surprise, the overall impact on Sitka's
diversified economy has been remarkably small, and at the
beginning of this summer Sitka had the lowest unemployment
rate in Alaska. Perhaps the most important
counterbalance to the mill closure is a boom in tourism over
the past fifteen years, due especially to the increase in
numbers and size of cruise ships. On almost every day from
late May to early September, one or more ships anchor just
offshore, bringing 700 to 2,000 passengers to Sitka.
Visitors also arrive on state operated ferries and
commercial jets -- coming to take in the scenery, watch
wildlife, hike, kayak, camp, catch fish, and experience
something of life in a small Alaskan town. Sitkans have
mixed feelings about these enthusiastic throngs: although
most everybody wants tourism, there's also a feeling that
numbers should be regulated to make sure travelers have a
high quality experience and locals preserve their peaceful
way of life. A major element in that way of
life is subsistence -- meaning the harvest of game, fish,
and edible plants for use at home. To understand Sitka and
other southeast Alaskan towns, it's essential to understand
how passionately people feel about subsistence and how much
wild harvests contribute to the economy. For example, an
average Sitka household consumes about 300 pounds of fish
and 150 pounds of deer venison every year. Many local folks
love to hunt, fish, and gather; they enjoy doing these
activities together with family members and friends; they
value healthy, organic wild foods that they've harvested for
themselves; they enjoy sharing subsistence foods; and they
feel that subsistence activities strengthen their sense of
connection to the land and sea. Because Sitka is nested within
the Tongass National Forest, this publicly owned reserve is
a dominant factor in local people's lives -- a constant
focus of news and conversation. This is America's largest
national forest, measuring 26,500 square miles, about equal
to the size of West Virginia. Besides its remaining tracts
of ancient rainforest, the Tongass embraces spectacular
mountains, enormous glaciers, silent valleys, about a
thousand islands, and an intricate lacework of streams and
rivers. Emblematic of its biological richness, the Tongass
is one of the last places in the United States where
every plant and animal species known to have existed
before Columbus is still here. If it were located
anywhere else in the U.S., the Tongass probably would not be
a National Forest at all, but one of our most cherished
National Parks. For perspective, I should
mention that southeast Alaska has been intensively used and
inhabited over many thousands of years by ancestors of the
Tlingit Indians. And yet -- until the logging activities on
National Forest and Native Corporation lands in recent times
-- southeast Alaska was so rich, so pristine, and so
beautiful that early European visitors have often called it
a "wilderness," as if no one had ever lived here. This
testifies not only to the relatively small Tlingit
population using low impact technology, but also to their
traditional wisdom of viewing the natural environment as a
community of spiritual beings who must be treated with
humility, respect, and restraint. Where the Tongass National
Forest remains intact today, it is a tribute to that
cultural tradition as well as a legacy from nature herself.
Today, we face hard decisions about balancing that legacy
against our economic interests. Many Sitkans feel that -- as
residents of the Tongass -- they have a special stake in
these discussions as residents of the Tongass, and that
local people should have the strongest say in how the
National Forest is managed. Here again, discussions usually
center around that familiar dichotomy of "jobs versus
protection." But under present law, every
American citizen holds an equal share in these national
public wildlands, every citizen has an equal right to visit
them, every citizen holds equal responsibility to assure
that they are treated properly, and every citizen has an
equal voice in deciding how they are used. It could be
said that the establishment of America's national public
lands -- which protect some of the world's most exceptional
natural beauty and biological diversity -- stands among our
nation's greatest achievements. And that the system that
gives all of us a voice in management of these lands is
among the finest expressions of American democracy. And
beyond this, that working for protection of these lands
should be regarded as a kind of patriotism -- speaking out
for the American land and all that lives on it, including
not only the plants and wildlife but also the
people. In the Tongass National Forest,
several of the most important, fascinating, and charismatic
animal species are heavily dependent on undisturbed
old-growth forest. One of these is the black-tailed deer,
which is an important source of food for Sitkans as well as
a creature esteemed for its beauty. In the Lower 48 states,
white-tailed deer and mule deer can benefit from the flush
of shrubby growth that follows clear-cut logging. But in
southeast Alaska, large stands of old-growth forest are
essential habitat for deer, especially during periods of
deep winter snow when open areas are deeply buried, making
it difficult for the animals to move around and find food.
To survive these conditions the deer need old-growth
forests, where a dense canopy of boughs intercepts snowfalls
and keeps the ground relatively clear. This gives deer
access to low-growing plants that are crucial to their
survival Salmon are very important in
southeast Alaska's commercial and subsistence economies, and
while we think of them as ocean and river dwellers, it is
equally true that salmon are fish of the forest. This is
because the streams where salmon spawn and where their young
are nurtured flow through ancient forests. Large trees are
important for maintaining the cool water temperatures
essential for salmon to survive, dense vegetation and root
networks under the trees prevent erosion that can degrade
spawning habitat, and trees that fall into stream beds
create the deep pools where spawning fish congregate.
Biological studies have
uncovered another dimension of this relationship. Each year
millions of salmon come from the far reaches of the ocean,
crowd up into southeast Alaska's streams, spawn in the
riverbed gravels, and then die. Their decaying bodies
fertilize the waterways, providing nutrients essential for
the growth of the next generation of salmon. Fish that enter
the streams to spawn are also eaten by bears, otters, mink,
eagles, gulls, and other animals. These predators and
scavengers deposit nutrients from the fish -- or parts of
the fish themselves -- back under the forest, where
nutrients from the sea are important for the health of the
entire plant community, including the giant trees. In this
way, an elegant reciprocity is created between salmon and
forests, each supporting and sustaining the other.
Another wildlife species that
depends on southeast Alaska's forests is the grizzly bear,
or brown bear, as it is called locally. These great animals,
weighing up to 800 pounds, range widely from the high
mountain country down to the estuary meadows, from scrub
thickets to old-growth forest; but researchers have found
that the bears make very little use of freshly logged areas
or second growth forest that grows up after clear-cutting.
Recently, geneticists also
discovered that the grizzly bears on three islands in the
northern Tongass -- Admiralty, Chichagof, and Baranof (where
Sitka is located) -- are profoundly different from all other
brown/grizzly bears in the world. Apparently, these Tongass
island bears have been isolated from all others for many
thousands of years, going through relatively little
evolutionary change while the brown/grizzly bears everywhere
else have evolved much more rapidly. As a consequence,
Tongass island bears are a kind of "living ancestor," more
similar in many ways to the Asiatic brown bear than they are
to their grizzly kin on mainland North America. Even more
remarkably, they have a very close genetic relationship to
the polar bear. One further note. Biologists
estimate that there are now about 1,200 grizzly bears living
on Baranof Island. This is more than the total of 1,000
grizzlies found today in the entire lower forty-eight
states, where it is conjectured that at least 50,000
grizzlies existed at the time of Columbus. As tourism has become
increasingly important for Sitka's economy, wildlife species
like brown bears, salmon, and blacktailed deer have also
become more valuable. For example, it's likely that every
grizzly living in the Sitka area is worth a lot -- in purely
monetary terms -- because so many people come here with a
strong interest in seeing bears. Some Sitkans also suggest
that Tongass forests are becoming more valuable not as
lumber for the market but as vast expanses of trees standing
on the mountainsides and along the valley floors. In other
words, ancient forests and wild bears have become important
living resources for this community. In Alaska today, it may be true
that what we take from the land and waters is less important
than what we leave here to grow and thrive. Trees, bears, salmon, and deer
might also have a kind of spiritual value -- not just for
Sitkans but for everyone who comes to experience them. For
many thousands of years, the Tlingit Indians and other
Native people in Alaska treated everything in the natural
world as a community of beings possessed of spiritual power.
These traditions also teach that all of nature must be
treated with humility, respect, and restraint. acknowledging
that plants and animals are the source of human life.
I would like to close with a
short passage from The Island Within -- a kind of
personal credo, based on the teachings of Koyukon Indians,
with whom I lived for some years: The dark boughs reach out above
me and encircle me like arms. I feel the assurance of being
recognized, as if something powerful and protective is aware
of my presence, looks in another direction but always has me
in the corner of its eye. I am cautious and self-protective
here, as anywhere, yet I believe that a covenant of mutual
regard and responsibility binds me together with the forest.
We share in a common nurturing. Each of us serves as an
amulet to protect the other from inordinate harm. I am never
alone in this wild forest, this forest of elders, this
forest of eyes.
For information on the Harriman Retraced Expedition e-mail: harriman2001@science.smith.edu
Expedition
Log
I have often thought
of the forest as a living cathedral, but this might
diminish what it truly is. If I have understood Koyukon
teachings, the forest is not merely an expression or
representation of sacredness, nor a place to invoke the
sacred; the forest is sacredness itself. Whoever moves
within the forest can partake directly of sacredness,
experience sacredness with his entire body, breathe
sacredness and contain it within himself, drink the
sacred water as a living communion, bury his feet in
sacredness, touch the living branch and feel the
sacredness, open his eyes and witness the burning beauty
of sacredness. And when he cuts a tree from the forest,
he participates in a sacred interchange that brings
separate lives together.
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