The Tongass National Forest, sprawling across seventeen million acres of the southeast Alaskan archipelago, is one of America's rarest national treasures. This rain forest--a type of ecological wonder seldom found far beyond the equator--is a land filled with a rich diversity of wildlife and vegetation.

Today, the Tongass is disappearing before our eyes as timber companies cut deeper and deeper into the wilderness. Environmentalists are fighting to block further clear-cutting, which is laying waste to the magnificent stands of virgin timber.

One of America's finest landscape photographers, Robert Glenn Ketchum, has recorded here the beauty of a wilderness that is fragile despite its majesty. He presents the area's enduring wonders as well as the blighted terrain of the leveled forest.

The authors--Robert Glenn and Carey D. Ketchum--recount in detail the shortsighted policies that industry and the federal government are implementing in southeast Alaska. In candid conversations, the residents of small towns who fish and live off the land tell the authors how their tranquil lives are being transformed.

The Tongass: Alaska's Vanishing Rain Forest is a classic work of environmental protest that reports on the profound political developments that have taken place in recent years and documents the continuing struggle to protect the Tongass.

Robert Glenn Ketchum's extraordinary photographs present the enduring natural wonders of the Tongass, as well as the damage inflicted by clear-cutting, while the text recounts the shortsighted policies implemented by industry and the federal government.

First published by Aperture in 1987, The Tongass played a vital role in Congress's passage of the Tongass Timber Reform Bill in 1990. This marked a turning point in the attempts to balance the management of this national forest--the largest in the United States. The Tongass is the rarest and most intact temperate old-growth rain forest in the world. Its preservation is crucial, as this important book reveals.