Trouble in the Tongass


What a great thing to make a documentary with an urgent call-to-action. It's like a built-in test of effectiveness and makes everything that much more real. I recently watched Elsa Sebastian's, "Understory" - a short film about the threatened ecological integrity of her home island, Prince of Wales, and the Tongass National Forest, and was moved to blog.
In an act of love and protest, Sebastian embarked on a 150-mile expedition to ground-truth the forests proposed to be turned into timberlands on her home island, Prince of Wales. Sebastian was joined by two other women, Dr. Natalie Dawson, a biologist who studies endemic species of the Tongass, and Mara Menahan, a botanical illustrator. The three women bushwhacked through the rainforest threatened by the proposed public lands giveaway and spent the next several years sharing what they’d learned from the land.

Ever since reading "The Starship and the Canoe" by Kenneth Brower, I have been interested in the Pacific coast and all its little inlets and islands. So, when watching Understory, I particularly liked how a sailboat was used for travel. Sadly, however, the scenes of logging wreckage are both excruciating and infuriating. What is wrong with us! Is everything a business transaction? Is our world so dependent on harvested trees? What's going on here? Maybe we need to make a new rule: the only person who has the right to cut down a tree is the person who planted it.

Add in the current Wet'suwet'en crisis - opposing construction of a multi-billion-dollar natural gas pipeline, and the indigenous people of the region have a big fight on their hands. Clearcuts and pipelines mark the industrial world's needs, but as I think more and more about it, I am beginning to think that the only good use for these resources is art. Yep that's right art. Seeing the Haida totem poles, created from cedar, it just clicked. Art and the process of creating something beautiful is the only thing that honors the resources accordingly. What's happening now with these drug-ridden industries is a detestable abomination and totally lacks taste, class, and purpose.

We're on a time crunch here. The public comment window for restoring Roadless Rule protections for 9 million acres of the Tongass is open until January 24th, 2022. Here's the form - https://www.laststands.org/action to fill out. Let's put a halt to this nonsense.

We can use our conscience to save the Tongass and its understory.

It's the right thing to do.

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