Pre-expedition Interview
  Conducted on July 20, 1998, by Michael Heasley

MH: You’re leaving on assignment this weekend. Where are you going?

JOYCE: We’re going to be flying to Seattle and then flying on to Juneau in southeastern Alaska. And from there we’ll be taking a boat to a place called Goose Flats, which is in the Tongass Forest, which is the largest national forest in the United States. The reason that we want to go to this particular place is because the Tongass is part and parcel of the world’s very largest temperate rain forest. There’s no other place in the world like this. It’s an immense, huge remnant of the kind of rain forests that used to stretch all across the northwestern part of the continent.

When people think about rain forests, they often think about tropical rain forests, like the Amazon. Rarely do they realize that there is a massive, but unfortunately dwindling, rain forest in the northwestern part of the United States and Canada. So we’re going up there to help some people...who are doing an unusual and provocative type of survey that’s never been done before.

MH: And who are these people?

JOYCE: Sam Scaggs and Richard Carstenson are the two people who are running this enterprise. Sam Scaggs is, as I understand it, part of the time a fisherman and something of an adventurer and an outdoorsman and a naturalist. Richard Carstenson is also a naturalist and a writer. What they have endeavored to do is go out and do what has not been done, which is to map the largest stands of old-growth trees—the very, very largest trees in America outside of California.

Not every old-growth stand is alike. Some have one huge tree and many smaller trees around it. Some have a much more even distribution of large trees. The fact is that ecologists and biologists don’t really know very much about how each of these different types of old-growth stands work in an ecological sense, how they affect wildlife, how wildlife prefers one type of old growth to another. And without knowing these things—and in the face of the fact that there’s a lot of logging still going on, and possibly much more to come—it’s important to understand them. And you can’t understand them until you know where they are.

MH: Is the forest industry interested in getting logging rights to the Tongass?

JOYCE: The logging industry already has some rights to log in the Tongass....It’s been guaranteed by the U.S. government for years....I’m not clear on the status of logging now. There’s not much, but there’s a lot of pressure to do more. While the Tongass is huge, only a small percentage of it is covered with old growth. A lot of the rest of it has been cut. While laypeople may not be able to distinguish between a 75- or 100-year-old forest versus a 400-year forest, believe me, there’s a big difference if you’re an animal.

What you see in an old-growth forest alongside a stream at this time of year are salmon runs where the salmon are so thick that you can almost walk across the water. You see lots of grizzly bears and black bears who are feasting on the salmon. You see otter. You see all sorts of waterfowl and other indigenous birds that depend on the old growth. The concern is that once you lose the old growth, you’re going to lose the kind of system that sustains that kind of wildlife.

MH: How many species of trees are we talking about in this particular area?

JOYCE: Here you have the spruce, which predominate, and the hemlock and the cedar—plus beneath them many, many, many species of shrubs and herbs and ferns. As ecosystems go in the temperate climates in North America, or northern Europe for example, it’s quite diverse. So while you don’t get the riot of species that you do in the tropics, it’s remarkable for its part of the world.

MH: What hooked you on this story?

JOYCE: The Tongass is a place to see before it disappears. It’s much the same thing that inspired me to go to the rain forests of South America and Central America. Look, if you don’t see them now, if you don’t take a look at them and how they work, they’re going to be gone in 50 years—unless we can do something radical to stop it from happening. And if we can’t, I certainly want to be one of the people who saw them while they were there.

MH: What do you hope to communicate with sound? This is a Radio Expedition, after all.

JOYCE: It’s difficult to imagine trying to get sound out of a place that’s what people think of as a quiet forest, but forests aren’t necessarily quiet. There’s wildlife, there’s movement, there are the voices of the people there. And of course we want to try to be able to give trees a voice, and this is the way we do it, by recording the sound of getting there and the people who go there.

The importance of all of this is because if people don’t know about these trees, they don’t care about them. They’re going to end up as chopsticks or flooring. In a world where we can substitute other things for chopsticks and flooring, why cut down a 200-foot-tall (60-meter-tall), 800-year-old tree?

MH: What kind of a crew is going with you?

JOYCE: We have one engineer and a producer and myself.

MH: And you’re all going to be camping out? No cabins, no hotels?

JOYCE: I don’t think there’s a hotel on the itinerary. We’re going to be camping in tents and trekking around during the day finding these stands....We’re going to be out under canvas, under the rain probably, because this is a rain forest....It’s going to be hard work.