Here's a piece I found in the Anchorage Daily News over the holidays. Check it out - is it possible the Tongass timber wars may actually end? (You can get the full story on the Trout Unlimited website -- www.tu.org - Jay Cassell)

This holiday season brings the prospect of peace on a battlefront in one of Alaska's long-running resource development wars. In the Tongass National Forest, some conservation groups and a Southeast Alaska timber operator have joined forces to pursue a new style of forest management that repairs damage inflicted by clearcutting decades ago. Pacific Log and Lumber owner Steve Seley is the operator in question. He has a mill in Ketchikan that has been shut for more than a year. It's a casualty of the Tongass timber wars. Like most of the Tongass industry, the mill relied on logging Southeast Alaska's huge old-growth trees -- a hotly contested practice, especially since it required big federal subsidies to build logging roads and provide appropriate environmental oversight.

"The timber sales the Forest Service has been pursuing are no longer socially or politically palatable," says the Wilderness Society's Karen Hardigg, one of the conservationists supporting the new management approach for the Tongass.

NEW REALITY

Seley recognizes the new political reality. He notes there's a conservation-friendly administration in Washington, D.C., and Ted Stevens is gone from the U.S. Senate. Seley has worked with Hardigg and others in the Tongass Futures Roundtable, a stakeholder group that aims to get beyond the conflicts of the past and pursue a common economic and environmental vision for the forest.

The group believes there is great potential in restoring areas chewed up by industrial logging that fed the region's two giant pulp mills from the 1950s to the 1990s.

When those clear-cut areas grow back, they fill with dense stands of "second-growth" trees -- so dense that sunlight can't reach the floor, forest plants can't grow and wildlife can't move around.

"Deer in particular take a hammering," Seley says.

Thinning out second growth can be good for the forest and its wildlife, while providing wood for a smaller-scale timber industry.