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Tongass: |
In Tongass, award-winning journalist Kathie Durbin chronicles a previously untold chapter in American environmental history. Set in Alaska's coastal rain forest, it's a dramatic story, by turns dismaying and inspiring, about greed, courage, bare-knuckles politics, and the fate of a remote, wild, beautiful land.
After World War II, the U.S. government lured two pulp companies to Southeast Alaska by promising them low-cost timber from the Tongass National Forest, the planet's largest coastal temperate rain forest. The mills brought jobs and growth to a sparsely settled region. They also wreaked ecological havoc and created a timber industry that broke labor unions, drove competitors out of business, and controlled politicians and the U.S. Forest Service. It took a national campaign, led by grassroots environmentalists, to bring sanity and sustainability to management of the Tongass.
In her insightful account Of Alaska's era of pulp, Durbin draws on the voices of the people mast affected: independent loggers who fought back when the pulp companies conspired to drive them out of business; courageous biologists who warned that logging was destroying critical fish and wildlife habitat; Tlingit Indians who saw their traditional hunting grounds vanish; young activists and lawyers who found their lives transformed by the battle for the Alaska rain forest.
"Tongass is an important revealing history of corporate harvesting of America's largest, and last, great rain forest.... This is advocacy at its best, based on the evidence, tough and honest, and marvelously written"--Stephen Haycox, University of Alaska-Anchorage
About the Author
Kathie Durbin is the author of Tree Huggers: Victory, Defeat and Renewal in the Northwest Ancient Forest Campaign, and has written about forest ecology and forest politics for The Oregonian, High Country News, Washington Monthly, Defenders, National Wildlife, and Cascadia Times. She lives in Portland, Oregon and works as an investigative reporter at The Columbian in Vancouver, Washington.
