Keeping it wild
(WorldNews Environment)

One of the issues that most reliably gets people excited and engaged is our campaign to defend our public lands, especially the Tongass National Forest. John Muir was among the early advocates for preserving this `wondrous world of mountains, ice fields, tidewater glaciers, rock-ribbed fjords, coastal brown bears, bald eagles,` with `mighty conifers up to 10 feet in diameter and 800 years old,` wearing `long beards of lichen and moss` that `drip with rain.` Teddy Roosevelt deemed it a national forest - America`s largest, at 17 million acres - in 1907. But why are people from California to Texas to Maine so passionate about a forest in remote southern Alaska? Much of that passion owes to the...