Senator Murkowski: The Roadless Rule is Working for Southeast Alaska
This morning, the Juneau Empire published a letter that I wrote in response to Lisa Murkowski’s recent Washington Post op-ed. In my letter, I do my best to question why Lisa Murkowski consistently sides with industrial interests while ignoring the needs of local economies and lifestyles that are are inextricably linked to the intact old-growth systems of the Tongass National Forest. Check out the letter here.
Spring devils club. Photo: Gleb Mikhalev.
Terry Tempest Williams has a definition of groundtruthing that I love:
GROUNDTRUTHING: WALKING THE GROUND TO SEE FOR ONESELF IF WHAT HAS BEEN TOLD IS TRUE
This resonates for me because ground-truthing and Last Stands has always felt like an intensely personal project. Even though I try to stay engaged on Tongass issues, being a vocal advocate and doing things like writing letters to the editor, doesn’t come easily for me. I grew up in Southeast Alaska in the midst of the ‘timber wars’, and back then there was a lot of hate, emotion, and righteousness. It wasn’t until my mid-twenties, when Trump was elected and I realized the scale of loss of wildlands that we faced as a nation, that I felt compelled to get involved with what was happening in my home region.
When I started the Last Stands project, it was because I was uncertain of the right way to engage, and I wanted to look to the land for a sense of direction. Arguments for conservation felt calcified by years of repetition, and I felt nervous to speak for anything confidently before I could see for myself what was true.
This project has given me courage to speak for the Tongass. Listening to the land isn’t some woo-woo thing, it’s just about taking the time to notice things. What I have seen in the last couple of years has compelled me to speak. I don’t think enough managers or politicians understand how dead the land feels when it’s recovering from clearcut logging. The image below is of ‘stem exclusion’ forest. It’s what happens when trees of a single age class grow back on a large area of land; they choke each other out and block almost all of the light from reaching the understory. This land will feel like a deadzone for 100 years or more.
Stem-exclusion forest. Photo: Natalie Dawson