The Book of the Tongass

Home to immemorial beauty, ancient and valuable timber and longstanding environmental disputes, the southeast Alaskan forest region called the Tongass has attracted Tlingit, Haida and Tsimshian tribes, lumber companies, eco-tourists and environmental activists. These 13 essays pay homage to its beauty and assess its controversies. In ""Heart of the Forest,"" Juneau-based biogeographer Richard Carstensen coaxes clear accounts of the area's soil and flora from his journey through it. Ecologist Paul Alaback places the Tongass in the context of other rain forests, and describes how it rebounds after winds and fires, in ""The Tongass Rain Forest--An Elusive Sense of Place and Time."" Former fisherman Brad Matsen offers a fish's-eye view in ""Salmon in the Trees."" Lawyer David Avraham Voluck, in ""First Peoples of the Tongass,"" explains Native peoples' ""subsistence way of life,"" which is inadequately protected, he argues, by federal legislation that governs the region. In ""Glacier Bay History,"" Tlingit storyteller Amy Marvin--one of two Native contributors, whose work is printed as verse--tells ""how things happened to us/ at Glacier Bay."" Daniel Henry presents the uncomfortable populace of Haines, Alaska, as the town's economy shifts from a past of logging to a hopeful future of tourism in ""Allowable Cut."" And PI/mystery writer John Straley (The Angels Will Not Care) explains with drama and sympathy, in ""Love, Crime, and Joyriding on a Dead End Road,"" who commits crimes in southeast Alaska and why. Servid and Snow (editor of the magazine Northern Lights) have assembled a worthwhile book. Never dryly technical, rarely shrill, these original pieces often go no deeper than good daily newspaper journalism, but most will reward nonspecialists interested in Alaska's forests, foresters, fish, First Peoples and the eco-economic issues that affect them all. (Aug.)