This holiday season brings the prospect of peace on a battlefront in one of Alaska's long-running resource development wars. In the Tongass National Forest, some conservation groups and a Southeast Alaska timber operator have joined forces to pursue a new style of forest management that repairs damage inflicted by clearcutting decades ago. Pacific Log and Lumber owner Steve Seley is the operator in question. He has a mill in Ketchikan that has been shut for more than a year. It's a casualty of the Tongass timber wars. Like most of the Tongass industry, the mill relied on logging Southeast Alaska's huge old-growth trees -- a hotly contested practice, especially since it required big federal subsidies to build logging roads and provide appropriate environmental oversight.
"The timber sales the Forest Service has been pursuing are no longer socially or politically palatable," says the Wilderness Society's Karen Hardigg, one of the conservationists supporting the new management approach for the Tongass.
NEW REALITY
Seley recognizes the new political reality. He notes there's a conservation-friendly administration in Washington, D.C., and Ted Stevens is gone from the U.S. Senate. Seley has worked with Hardigg and others in the Tongass Futures Roundtable, a stakeholder group that aims to get beyond the conflicts of the past and pursue a common economic and environmental vision for the forest.
The group believes there is great potential in restoring areas chewed up by industrial logging that fed the region's two giant pulp mills from the 1950s to the 1990s.
When those clear-cut areas grow back, they fill with dense stands of "second-growth" trees -- so dense that sunlight can't reach the floor, forest plants can't grow and wildlife can't move around.
"Deer in particular take a hammering," Seley says.
Thinning out second growth can be good for the forest and its wildlife, while providing wood for a smaller-scale timber industry.
AN EXPERIMENT
To try out the concept, Seley and Hardigg are supporting a pilot project at a place called Spit Point. It's a shoreline area in the Tongass where huge old-growth trees were heavily logged decades ago.
Seley says the dense regrown areas can be thinned out using a barge and booms to pluck out trees without building roads or scarring up the forest floor. Though the trees are relatively small, they can be chopped into wood chips and sold for fuel. One possible market is the Coast Guard, which is looking at converting its Alaska facilities to wood heat. Branches and other logging residue will be mulched into the forest floor.
It's the first project that has 100 percent support from the Tongass Futures Roundtable, according to Seley.
To do this kind of low-impact logging, though, Seley needs new equipment -- about $2.6 million worth. And to justify that investment, he needs one of two things -- a multi-year federal contract to do thinning work, so he can secure private financing, or a loan directly from the federal government.
WILL THE FEDS HELP?
"The new (Forest Service) chief wants to transition from old growth to second growth," Seley says. "We're more than willing to go that direction. But the government has to come to the party" with support for the necessary capital investment.
He says Forest Service and Department of Agriculture officials in Washington, D.C., have visited Southeast Alaska and they like what he's talking about. But he's worried that the necessary financial help won't arrive in time because the pace of change inside the federal bureaucracy is so slow.
"I'm 57 years old," Seley says. "I'm not getting any younger. I totally endorse the conversion and change (to the new kind of forest management) ... But if this drags out a couple years, I won't do it. I will liquidate the assets (in his mill) and do something different."
A BIG UPSIDE
What Seley is talking about requires a small federal investment with a big potential payoff, both to the timber economy in Southeast and to the Tongass Forest. Already, Seley says, he's heard from Canadians who are interested in low-impact thinning of second growth. That could be a huge market if Alaska operators can develop the expertise quickly. "The Canadians have harvested a hundred times as much (old-growth forest) as we have," Seley says.
The Wilderness Society's Hardigg recognizes battles are still being fought over old-growth Tongass timber sales in roadless areas, but she'd like to see this environment-friendly timber initiative go forward.
"Let's focus on the positive," Hardigg says, "and make it happen."
BOTTOM LINE: This forest restoration initiative could be good for both the economy and the environment.