Alaska looms large in Forest Service considerations, not only because the Tongass is the agency’s biggest jurisdiction. The state’s congressional delegation strongly supports further logging, and should Republicans take over the Senate after the November elections, Alaska’s senior senator, Lisa Murkowski, would preside over panels overseeing the agency’s budget and operations.

But this fight has the air of an endgame, a little like the fight to preserve the dwindling coal industry in the Appalachians. Tongass timber once sustained thousands of jobs, but supports only a few hundred today. And although the industry punches above its weight politically, it could struggle without the centuries-old trees that are valuable because of their fine grain, sturdiness and resistance to rot.

Conservationists want to protect those trees, moving loggers quickly to second-growth forests they liken to tree farms: uniform in age, lacking the clearings and lush undergrowth that wildlife requires. Once logged, they say, virgin forests need lifetimes to recover.

But moving to younger timber is hardly a sure thing. Those trees would compete with cheap lumber from elsewhere; Alaska’s remoteness and ruggedness make logging and shipping more costly. Sawmills would require new machinery probably affordable only with federal help.

Image

Though the Tongass is bigger than West Virginia — and one-third protected wilderness — preservationists say many of its best trees are gone. Two-thirds of the Tongass is tundra, rock or scrub forest. Only 4 percent holds the sprawling, high-quality stands of giant trees prized by the timber industry, typically at lower elevations or in valleys and river basins that are also prime wildlife habitat. Much of that has been logged — and the Forest Service has bulldozed more than 4,500 miles of roads through the forest to take the logs out.

The Tongass once was the region’s economic backbone, sustaining a booming, if heavily subsidized, timber industry. The government all but gave away virgin forest in the 1940s to lure pulp mills. Congress actually ordered the Forest Service in 1980 to auction 4.5 billion board feet of lumber every decade — enough for a stack of inch-thick, eight-foot planks nearly 9,000 miles high.