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!

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.

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.