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Rating: 
Summary: Pulp Fiction
Review: As a 50 year resident of Ketchikan, I was curious how a "tree hugger" would portray the fight for the Tongass--known in these parts as the fight for a reasonable standard of living. Ms. Durbin quotes environmental organizer Donald Ross on page 172: "It doesn't take much, when you're a congressman from Kansas and you've never heard of the Tongass, to get you to vote for trees." When all is said and done, that was the tactic of the environmentalists. On page 246, she says, "Most who did [find job after the Sitka mill closed] were forced to make do with a lower standard of living than they had become accustomed to on pulp mill wages." How easily she dismisses the plight of those who live in the Tongass. There's a lot Ms. Durbin doesn't mention like the fact that only the wealthy and refugees from the 60's can afford to experience up close & personal the pristine beauty of the nation's First Park. The environmentalists have won. Sierra Club, kiss my ax!
Rating:
Summary: Pulp Fiction
Review: As a 50 year resident of Ketchikan, I was curious how a "tree hugger" would portray the fight for the Tongass--known in these parts as the fight for a reasonable standard of living. Ms. Durbin quotes environmental organizer Donald Ross on page 172: "It doesn't take much, when you're a congressman from Kansas and you've never heard of the Tongass, to get you to vote for trees." When all is said and done, that was the tactic of the environmentalists. On page 246, she says, "Most who did [find job after the Sitka mill closed] were forced to make do with a lower standard of living than they had become accustomed to on pulp mill wages." How easily she dismisses the plight of those who live in the Tongass. There's a lot Ms. Durbin doesn't mention like the fact that only the wealthy and refugees from the 60's can afford to experience up close & personal the pristine beauty of the nation's First Park. The environmentalists have won. Sierra Club, kiss my ax!
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent Modern History of the Tongass
Review: As relative newcomer to Southeast Alaska (1998), I have found it difficult to obtain unbiased views regarding regional resource management. This excellent bit of history by Durbin tells a very important story about this incredible national resource and the people who have shaped it, for better or worse. Many of the people mentioned are neighbors and acquaintances who have played important roles in shaping the newer policies affecting the Tongass. I now have a much greater appreciation and respect for those who took real risks and fought hard to improve timber practices on the Tongass, which is more than I can say for our state's congressional delegation. Durbin has done a real service to those of us trying to better understand the complexities of the various governmental agencies, corporations(including Native corporations), environmental groups, and private citizens that intertwine to determine whether resources are to be managed in a truly sustainable fashion in this spectacular place.
Rating: 
Summary: Tongass describes how we almost lost a great rainforest.
Review: Even if you can't find Southeast Alaska on a map, when you finish reading Tongass you will understand why you should care about this remote region of rain and salmon and grizzlies, about the people who make a living here from the land and sea, and about the beautiful and unique forest that grows on its islands and rugged mainland. Tongass explains how our nation nearly squandered the planet's largest temperate rain forest, and how over 20 years a handful of environmentalists, fishermen and scientists succeeded in making the fate of the Tongass an international issue and rescuing this priceless legacy from the chainsaw. In the 1950s the Forest Service signed 50-year contracts with two large pulp companies guaranteeing them cheap timber from Southeast Alaska's Tongass National Forest. Over a half century those companies drove out independent loggers, broke their unions, polluted the water and air around their pulp mills, and stripped entire valleys of their old-growth forests. Tongass chronicles how a deal intended to bring jobs and people to a sparsely populated region fell apart due to greed, waste and changing public values. It tells the story in the words of the people who lived it: An inependent logger forced out of business by the pulp mills. Young, idealistic environmental activists. Fishermen angered by the impact of logging on once-pristine salmon streams. Disenchanted pulp mill workers. Courageous wildlife biologists and Forest Service whistleblowers. Tlingit Indians who found their hunting grounds destroyed by logging. Tongass tells a sobering tale, but it ends on a note of hope. As the book was going to press, both pulp mills had closed, the Tongass National Forest was in the throes of a transition to a new era of sustainable management, and communities in Southeast were looking to a brighter future. Alaska's half-century era of pulp had come to a close.
Rating:
Summary: Trash
Review: I have lived in the Tongass,, The Tongass is being sold out to the tour package industry,, this industry is no different than any other. The people who live here through its most harsh winters are being dictated to by feel good (my Disney Land) visitors. Many wonderful Alaskan familys have been displaced because of this myth.
Rating:
Summary: In 2003 we are still tearing this treasure down
Review: Journalist Kathie Durbin has written one of the finest investigative works that I have read. I'm a lawyer with biology and chemistry degrees and I find the extensive endnotes, legal references and her penchant to seek out and cite primary sources refreshing. There is nothing here that supports any label of the author, save that of professional. This work has disturbed me for years. I have become more active in the fight to preserve the ONLY temperate rain forest left in North America because of her clear and concise use of well-supported facts. The most disturbing fact not in the book is that the lumber industry is now nothing but a byproduct of the pulp industry. Ms. Durbin shows us how Salmon spawning grounds destroyed out of greed and carelessness by logging right up to the spawning streams and destroying the shade that the Salmon's Redd's require, and by the disposal of low pH waste into bays and estuaries and by the effects of runoff from clearcuts (damaging sub-arctic land and water: a fragile environment, indeed). There is no room to debate the facts...only the policy. Calling this work or its author names simply illustrates the old adage: if you can't win on the facts attack the fact-finder. Read this book. ANWAR may be the cause celeb today, but the damage to the Tongass is going on NOW.
Rating:
Summary: In 2003 we are still tearing this treasure down
Review: Journalist Kathie Durbin has written one of the finest investigative works that I have read. I'm a lawyer with biology and chemistry degrees and I find the extensive endnotes, legal references and her penchant to seek out and cite primary sources refreshing. There is nothing here that supports any label of the author, save that of professional. This work has disturbed me for years. I have become more active in the fight to preserve the ONLY temperate rain forest left in North America because of her clear and concise use of well-supported facts. The most disturbing fact not in the book is that the lumber industry is now nothing but a byproduct of the pulp industry. Ms. Durbin shows us how Salmon spawning grounds destroyed out of greed and carelessness by logging right up to the spawning streams and destroying the shade that the Salmon's Redd's require, and by the disposal of low pH waste into bays and estuaries and by the effects of runoff from clearcuts (damaging sub-arctic land and water: a fragile environment, indeed). There is no room to debate the facts...only the policy. Calling this work or its author names simply illustrates the old adage: if you can't win on the facts attack the fact-finder. Read this book. ANWAR may be the cause celeb today, but the damage to the Tongass is going on NOW.
Rating:
Summary: How we almost lost a national treasure
Review: Kathie Durbin reveals the irresponsible and corrupt practices of the U.S. government, the Forest Service, and the pulp mills it was in bed with in Southeast Alaska, and how their destructive logging practices politicized a whole contingent of people to stop the decimation of our last temperate rainforest. Read "Tongass" and your blood will boil over what happened there, and what is still happening in many of our other forests today.
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