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Deeper Diving Into The Tongass

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Deeper Diving Into The Tongass

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Part 1: What We Learned Cruising With The Boat Company In this episode we share a deeper dive into the Tongass Naational Forest. We have combined several bits of research, interviews and personal experience into twoNotebook generated conversations. The convo not only shows the advantages of sailing with The Boat Company, but also delves into the science that illustrates exactly why The Boat Company continues its committed to preserving this large expanse of inimitable space. Living The Could Life contains affiliate links. They don’t cost you anything, but we may earn a small commission if you use them. We may have been hosted on a trip, excursion or other travel-related event. We may have received or experienced a product for review. Any opinion is our own. Transcript Click Here for Transcript Speaker 2: So, I want you to imagine that you are sitting on this incredibly green, mossy log in absolute silence. Speaker 2: Just totally off the grid. Speaker 2: Exactly. You are miles from cell service and you think, ah, I have completely escaped the global economy. I'm finally out of it. Speaker 1: Yeah, you feel totally isolated from all of that. Speaker 2: Right. But you are actually sitting right on top of a highly aggressive $2.2 billion commodities market. Speaker 1: Oh, wow. That is quite the visual. Speaker 2: Isn't it? So, welcome to our deep dive into the Tongass National Forest in Southeast Alaska. Speaker 1: It's an incredible topic and I'm really excited to get into the sources we have today. Speaker 2: Same here. But before we get into the hidden mechanics of what is happening under that moss, I really want you to try and picture the sheer scale of this place. Because, I mean, when I hear the word forest, my brain usually defaults to a nice, manageable state park. Speaker 1: Right. Like maybe some paved trails, a little visitor center. Speaker 2: Yeah, a place you can drive across in an hour, buy a postcard and go home. But the Tongass is over 16 million acres. Speaker 1: Which is, I mean, to put 16 million acres into a frame of reference that the human brain can actually process, you are looking at a landmass that covers roughly 80% of all of Southeast Alaska. Speaker 2: 80%? Speaker 1: Yeah. It is the largest national forest in the United States by a massive margin. But it is not just, you know, a monolithic block of pine trees sitting on a flat plain. The geography is completely splintered. Speaker 2: Splintered is a great way to put it. Speaker 1: Right. Because we are talking about an archipelago of over 1,000 individual islands and they're separated by these incredibly deep, dark saltwater fjords. Speaker 2: It's just wild. Speaker 1: And you have massive ancient glaciers carving their way down mountainsides directly into the ocean. The ocean literally weaves right into the heart of the timber. And crucially, this is a temperate rainforest. Speaker 2: Yeah. And that distinction changes everything about how the ecosystem functions. Because I think people hear the word rainforest and they automatically picture, you know, the Amazon or the Congo Basin. Speaker 1: Right. The tropics, sweltering heat, the jumble vibes. Speaker 2: Exactly. But temperate rainforests operate on entirely different biological rules and they are incredibly scarce. I mean, they make up only about 2.5% of the world's total forest coverage. Speaker 1: It's a tiny fraction. Speaker 2: It really is. And the Tongass happens to be one of the only temperate rainforests left on Earth that still remains largely intact and functioning just as it did thousands of years ago. Speaker 1: Okay, let's unpack this. Because we have an incredible stack of source material to get through today. Speaker 2: We really do. Tons of ground to cover. Speaker 1: And the goal here is to merge two wildly different realities presented in these sources. The first reality is the boots-on-the-ground, visceral, deeply human experience of actually standing in that untouched wilderness. Speaker 2: The subjective experience of it. Speaker 1: Exactly. We have firsthand accounts, interviews with captains and conservationists, and stories of people trying to navigate a landscape that actively resists human infrastructure. Speaker 2: It does not want us there. Speaker 1: No, it doesn't. And then the second reality is the uncompromising, high-stakes physics of global carbon cycles, climate buffering, and the incredibly intense federal policy battles over whether to log this land or just leave it alone. Speaker 2: Right. And I feel like the connective tissue between those two realities is how you actually get into the forest to see it in the first place. Speaker 1: Because you can't just rent a car. Speaker 2: No. You cannot just rent a car and drive through the Tongass. Yeah. There's almost no road system connecting these islands. The landscape completely forbids it. So to understand this place, you have to get on the water. Speaker 1: You have to take a boat...

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