AT THE EDGE of the North American continent, between the shoreline and coastal mountain ranges in southern Alaska, lies the Tongass National Forest. Its 16.7 million acres are part of the largest extant temperate rainforest, yet this is merely a remnant of what was once a thick belt of coastal forest extending from Alaska to California, a fact rarely brought up when we debate how much more of the Tongass we should log.
In the United States, forest conservation and logging have always gone hand in hand, so when the Tongass was declared a national forest, its land was protected against development but not extraction. In the post–World
