The state of West Virginia could fit inside the Tongass. At 17 million acres (7 million hectares), the Tongass is both the United States’ largest national forest and the world’s greatest intact stand of temperate rain forest. But ruinous timber practices have tarnished this global treasure. North Americans fault South Americans for the destruction of Amazonia, yet North America’s own rain forest is also in danger and is disappearing before our eyes.

The Tongass Timber Reform Act of 1990 was designed to correct decades of abuse in the Tongass. But according to a report by the Association of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics, the Forest Service violated this law in both letter and spirit: The agency allowed the biggest and rarest stands to be logged out of proportion to their natural occurrence, contrary to a provision of the act. It also failed, in places, to enforce the minimum 100-foot (30-meter), no-cut buffer zones required along all salmon and high-quality trout streams. And it ignored scientific studies that recommended reduced cutting to protect certain wildlife.

Spokesmen at Tongass today deny any wrongdoing and disparage the report’s claims. But numerous field biologists and others who know this forest insist that areas with higher quality trees have been cut at too rapid a rate. Many also note that Tongass sells its timber to logging companies at a net loss to the taxpayer.

Most timber sales throughout all national forests lose money; they are not sales as much subsidies for the timber industry. But no forest runs more red ink than Tongass. In 1992 its timber programs ran up the biggest annual loss for any forest in history—more than U.S. $64 million, according to the Native Forest Council, $42 million, according to the federal government’s General Accounting Office.

Adapted from the book American Legacy: Our National Forests (National Geographic Society, 1997) by Kenneth Brower.