Entangled Roots: Knowledge Systems and Conservation in the Tongass National Forest

• Main Author: Lustig, Lily Geneva
• Format: Text
• Language: unknown
• Published: Bard Digital Commons 2021
• Subjects: Conservation; Importance of Place; Ecological Knowledge; Entanglement; Alaska; Environmental Studies; Social and Cultural Anthropology; haida; tlingit; Tsimshian; Tsimshian*
• Online Access: https://digitalcommons.bard.edu/senproj_s2021/100; https://digitalcommons.bard.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1254&context=senproj_s2021

Alaska’s Tongass National Forest is the world’s largest remaining temperate rainforest, sequestering up to eight percent of all the carbon stored in the lower forty-eight states’ national forests combined. Home to the Tlingit, Tsimshian, and Haida peoples for over ten-thousand years, the Tongass's protection is central for knowledge production and livelihood. Despite the Tongass's importance for local communities and for mitigating climate change, the policies that restrict extractive industries like logging in the forest are constantly contested by United States politicians, putting the forest and the people who rely on it in jeopardy. With a re-centering of Indigenous scientific knowledge systems and a decolonized land ethic, the Tongass can continue to support the multiplicity of lives that are entangled with that of the forest's.