A new way to profit from ancient Alaskan forests--leave them standing

In the Tongass National Forest, threatened by expanded logging, a Native-owned corporation is being paid to leave some old-growth trees standing.

When I visit Sealaska’s corporate headquarters in downtown Juneau, snow-capped mountains loom in the background, shrouded by a December sky that’s a palette of every imaginable shade of gray. Heavy snow coats the ground for the first time in the season, a mark of how quickly the climate is changing. As recently as the 1990s, many people told me, there would have been regular knee-deep snows.

Now, every time Anthony Malott, the Stanford-educated CEO of Sealaska, flies home, there’s more rock on the mountains below, and less ice.

The nervousness over rapid change hangs over every conversation I have in Southeast Alaska. People talk about it as a climate refuge, “one of the last temperate places that’s going to be left,” one says. They point to the plants struggling to flower in the strange false spring of December, and the ocean turning warm, forcing the salmon north to Bristol Bay, where the cold currents they live on still swirl.

Malott is Tlingit, one of the three main Native peoples who live up and down the islands and channels of Southeast Alaska, and part of the much larger cultural grouping that goes down to Washington State. The peoples of Southeast Alaska—like their neighbors as far south as Seattle—were part of an international, but shared, world, in which Haida, Tsimshian, and Tlingit fought and traded and raided each other under a common religious and clan system. It was supervised by a form of international governance that regulated, to painstaking degree, the use of the productive, fragile forests and rivers of the Northwest Coast.

The land was so rich that the Northwest Coast people had developed settled towns and fortified cities without agriculture. They didn’t need it. Every year millions of salmon, which had spent their lives getting fat off the shrimp and eels of the North Pacific, flung themselves up the rocky streams that drain off the Coast Range, and their bodies infused energy and nutrients into the forests and the creatures that lived there.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/02/new-way-to-profit-from-ancient-alaskan-forests-leave-them-standing/?cmpid=org=ngp::mc=social::src=linkedin::cmp=editorial::add=li20200209science-newscienceforestryprofit:rid=&sf229836249=1

Long article, with lots of pics, well worth reading.