3

Leveraging Alaska

Outside, the Tongass National Forest lines the shore. Inside, the philanthropist Michael McIntosh peers into a screen. He’s checking the markets, adjusting his investment portfolio. Wi-fi through the Alaskan archipelago on the Juneau to Sitka route is a crapshoot. You grab a signal when you can.

We guests start wondering where he’s got to. Twenty of us are served by a crew of 13, including a naturalist who helps direct our binoculars. Those white specks high on the hills? They’re mountain goats. Those others in the tops of Sitka spruces? Bald eagles. This is the last week of August, almost close season for the Boat Company. Rain and dull skies were expected, but instead sunlight turns the waters of the Inner Sound a radical blue.

Most of these guests know the philanthropist of old. Is he all right? Sure, he’s all right. That damn signal stayed good for a solid half hour. He checked his stocks, downloaded his emails, and scrolled through their attachments. They’ve come from lawyers. These documents are part of his latest litigation. He’s always in litigation. Hell, why own the damn boat if you’re not going to litigate? This is fun.

‘Has anybody seen Michael?’ a guest asks.

‘You know Michael. He’s in his office.’ Winsome McIntosh smiles, because she’s the perfect host, but she’s calculating. The ‘office’ is a cabin her husband appropriated the moment he found it was free. Winsome’s ambition to give Michael a break, to rip him free from his data and newsfeeds and bring him out into company, was a loser from the get go. Still, she keeps hoping. ‘He’ll be out for cocktails.’

A skiff is lowered and a crewmember dispatched to a raft of ice that has floated loose from an iceberg. He hacks off a chunk and brings it back. Chopped into pieces, the ice is as pure and ancient as any that’s ever settled on the bottom of a whisky tumbler. That might tempt Michael from his lair. He’s American, but the McIntosh ancestry is what counts. ‘I’m Scotch,’ he’ll declare, and grin. ‘Not the nicest people in the world. Pugnacious.’

Imagine a boat for Michael McIntosh, and it would be this one. Called Mist Cove after Michael’s favourite Alaskan bay, its luxury is modest. The sofas and armchairs of its lounge are like a gentleman’s club, while the removable plastic windows help turn the aft into a panoramic dining room where guests settle around one large table. Forty metres long, the boat is powered by a reconditioned World War II engine and modelled on a Korean War–era minesweeper. Those wartime reference points are not incidental. Guests might be on a leisure cruise, but Michael is on a campaign.

Drinks are poured, and guests wander out to the railings to stare out at a passing cruise vessel that is even more leisurely than their own. Its passengers are seals, and the vessel is a raft of ice broken off from a glacier with a shimmer of pale blue captured inside of it. Seals and people gaze at each other.

We hear a low laugh. Michael’s emerged. He’s dressed for the evening in a crisply laundered checked shirt. Winsome’s responsible for his shirt; he’s responsible for shaving. His cheeks are hollow and graded with stubble. Maybe he laughs because he found the seals funny, or maybe the people. He has been coming to Alaska for 60 years. He doesn’t need to see any more such scenes. He just needs to know they’re still happening. It’s good that seals hitch a ride on miniature icebergs. Good that influential people come up from the lower 48 states to catch something of the wonders of the place. And good that he’s got a pack of lawyers fighting to keep it this way.

‘I’m essentially a city girl,’ Winsome says of herself. Brought up in a military family, she moved every two years and had to keep making friends. ‘That taught me people skills. Michael and I are very much opposites. He’s a very solitary guy, very happy in his own skin and company. He once told me he could come and live in a cabin out in the wilds of Alaska for the rest of his life. I’m much more people oriented. We complement each other. We have opposite talents.’

You could invent a new word for Michael. Ditch ‘philanthropist’, a lover of mankind, and invent ‘philarborist’. ‘To this day,’ he admits, ‘I’m more affected by the way we treat trees than the way we treat people.’

The first tree to really bond with him was a horse chestnut. It grew on the family estate, some hundreds of shoreline hectares near the town of Port Washington on Long Island. He played in its shade. There’s scarce a horse chestnut left in the USA anymore. Michael was 11 when wartime gas rationing moved the family closer to their New York offices. You can’t blame a kid as young as that for not saving a whole tree species, but I bet sometimes he wonders.

He was a sparky kid. He remembers chasing his piano teacher around the living room with a knife. At 80, that pugnacious part of him raises its fists in defence of an oak he had the city plant on the street outside his home in Washington, DC, to replace a small one that died. It was 2.5 metres tall when it went in, and now it’s 15 metres and its branches spread. Woe betide any trucker who parks so as to bend or break any one of those branches; Michael’s out on the street cussing them and calling the police. ‘You can screw with some things,’ he says, ‘but you can’t screw with my goddamned trees.’

He’s fond of a spruce that grows at Sitka airport. Most wouldn’t notice it. It’s only one metre in diameter. What people don’t respect as they fly in and out is the tight band of growth rings that reaches into its heart. They show that this tree was already growing in this spot before Columbus set foot in America in 1492.

That tree’s like Michael somehow: rooted, stubborn, slow to show itself. And then it hits you: this tree owns the territory, and you’re trespassing.

It’s hard to get Michael McIntosh to admit to a sentiment beside love for his wife and anger at everything. Go looking for some pattern of purpose, and you’re on your own. ‘Saving a million acres wasn’t in my childhood,’ he says. ‘That came at 37, 38, 39 years old. That’s when some of the principles of the work you are going to be doing for the rest of your life are established.’

Some of those principles were jarred into place in the 1950s. Michael had ideas for a career. He taught regular dancing at the Fred Astaire School of Dance in order to pay for tap dancing lessons, and danced in the chorus for the out of town tryouts of a musical. Permanent hire on Broadway was on the cards. His father got wind of it. Michael was dispatched to an Alaskan cannery. Instead of the boards of Broadway, he was treading the bark of logs strung together in the Inner Sound.

The cannery was part of the family business — one that just happened to be America’s biggest retailer. Founded by Michael’s mother’s grandfather in 1859, the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company became a household name as A&P. In 1930, it already had 16,000 stores and sales of $1 billion. In 1936, when Michael was three years old, it brought in the concept of the self-serve supermarket. 4,000 of these larger supermarkets were opened by 1950. A&P made their move into Alaska after World War I, when prices for canned salmon plummeted and they snapped up failing canneries.1 Michael’s 1951 job was at Waterfall Cannery with the Nakat Canning Company, America’s largest fishery and an A&P subsidiary.

Waterfall Cannery opened in 1912, carved out of 23 hectares of wilderness on the west coast of Prince of Wales Island. It became its own community for the months of the salmon run each season, with workers arriving by seaplane or boat. Michael was set to work on the fish traps — nothing more than a series of logs lashed together in squares with a cable running through 45 metres from one of the logs to the shore where it was anchored. He learned to handle the five metre tidal swings and drop a wire mesh net down to the bottom. Salmon tended to migrate along the shoreline, where they would hit the net and swim into the traps. The catch was between 10,000 and 30,000 fish per day.

The traps allowed few fish to escape. A diminishing resource was obvious by the late 1940s. By Michael’s first visits in 1951, it was clear that the fish traps ought to be declared illegal. The federal government was enforcing antitrust laws against A&P, so plans for A&P to align with another large fishing company, NEFCO (New England Fishing Company), to lobby for a change in the law were abandoned. Such joint action might have been seen as anti-competitive.

Michael’s was a union job with 16 hour days; the workers took off at 8am, and were back at the dock with fish unloaded by 11.30pm. On their one free day a week, Michael and some colleagues put an outboard on a skiff and motored off to explore nearby islands. He was a teenager in the largest wilderness area in the USA, among spruces that measured three to four metres in diameter and had been there for up to 1,500 years. There were seven million hectares of such trees. As Michael grew into his 20s, he came to see the danger of outliving far too many of them.

Starting in the early 1950s, the government worked to develop a timber industry in Alaska by giving companies 50 year contracts to cut 1,000 year old trees. The biggest trees offered the best return. Initially, companies were allowed to cut them right up to the banks of the rivers, causing silt to wash into the waters and block the passage of fish. Controls then limited logging to within 50–60 metres of a stream. Alaska was so far away from the markets that the cost of shipping the timber made it uncompetitive with areas in the south and along the Pacific coast. Great trees were turned into pulp for the paper industry. This new industry had to be subsidised.

The logging of Alaska increased through the 1960s, while Michael moved out to the Middle East to work for A&P. When his mother grew sick, he got a transfer to the bakery division in Chicago. On a return flight, a Pan Am airline stewardess called Winsome caught his heart. He started wooing. Bouquets would greet her as she stepped from the plane at airports all around the world. Michael rounds off the story adroitly. ‘Met this broad on the way back from the Middle East and convinced her to join me in Chicago and lived happily ever after.’

His parents had created the McIntosh Foundation in 1949. Much of his mother’s wealth was swept into it on her death. Michael entered fight mode to wrest control of the Foundation from its previous trustees. ‘We had a debate,’ he understates.

His parents were Republicans, which in their era equated well with being conservationists. They had given Michael a lifetime membership of the Sierra Club, founded in 1892 with a focus on protecting the natural environment of West Coast America but spreading into being a dominant national organisation. It felt comfortable to shift Foundational support to environmental causes.

The Clean Water Act of 1972 rounded off a package of environmental legislation that was like a lovechild of the 1960s. From a radical, feel-good decade, relative youngsters set boundaries for protecting the natural world in the more straitened decades to come. The USA had set the global standard. Lawyers now had the toolkit to address environmental damage. But lawyers are expensive. Michael McIntosh just happened to have a pot of money he could dip into.

‘Foundation money is public money, not our money,’ is how Michael states it. The Foundation had his name on it. He could imbue it with his character and make it pugnacious, but it didn’t belong to him. He applied the business ethic of achieving maximum return on investment. ‘$10,000 here and $10,000 there on a lawsuit got you a heck of a lot more than buying $10,000 of land, so why not take a chance? Could we do more public good one way versus the other? If it worked, that was a good use of public money. Better than our Congress usually manages.’

Not that Michael restricted the Foundation to such $10,000 grants. His family foundation is a small one, a flyweight among heavyweights. They had to pack a punch. It was in his family genes after all. Michael used to visit his grandfather Arthur Hoffman in the 1940s. The man was old and his health was fading. Even so, he brought fighters into the boxing ring in the basement of his New Jersey home and worked to give them a pasting. The lightweight champion of the world? Bring him on. The old guy and the champ slugged it out.

Michael states his philosophy. ‘A small foundation, giving away $1 million a year, can give away a hundred grants of 10,000, etc., and be invited to all sorts of parties but not be doing anything. Four to five grants of $200,000 apiece, which in those days could make a difference, that’s where we went. Seemed like a smarter use of money.’

The Ford Foundation had just funded the nascent NRDC’s battle with the US taxing authority, the IRS. In 1970, NRDC was freed to be a not for profit organisation and litigate. Michael McIntosh matched the Ford’s funding of $400,000 ($2.25 million as a current equivalent), repeated at two year intervals.

‘We were different from many,’ Michael recalls. ‘If we liked the organisation, we gave a general support grant. That’s been our history. But many foundations only wanted to fund a particular project. It didn’t always cover all the organisation’s costs.’

Those were heady days. Six months after joining the board of NRDC, Michael McIntosh was on the board of the Sierra Club, and would join the boards of the National Audubon Society and the Wilderness Society too. He gave out similarly large grants, spending down the Foundation’s capital.

Why the hurry? In 1971, the US government was set to give a contract through its Forestry Service to wood product company US Champion Plywood to cuts tens of thousands of hectares of old growth on Admiralty Island. These were some of the trees Michael had visited 20 years before. One hundred and sixty kilometres long with 1,100 kilometres of shoreline, Admiralty Island is home to the world’s largest populations of grizzly bears (some 1,600 of them, outnumbering humans by about three to one) and bald eagles. Trees would be hauled off to a pulp mill at Echo Cove just outside of Juneau. They would emerge as 8.4 billion board feet of timber.

Michael funded the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund to bring a series of lawsuits against the US government to block them giving acreage. These forests of Sitka spruce and western hemlock first took root 7,000 years ago, as ice sheets pulled back from the region. Clear cut these forests and that’s it, they will never come back. And nor will the ecosystem of which they are a part.

One of the wonders of Alaska is the interdependency of life there. When the guests on Michael’s boats walk through the forests, they’re trained to shout out ‘Hey, Bear!’, for this is the grizzlies’ territory and you don’t want to surprise them. These trees are the bears’ home. When guests tread the forest floor, the thick mounds of moss make it like walking across a sponge. Water seeps steadily from these sponges to fuel the streams. The forest canopy provides the shade that keeps the waters cool. The stream bulges around fallen logs that offer spaces of protection for the salmon fry. Insects drift from the fertile forest to serve as food for the fish. And the salmon, of course, return from crossing the oceans to push up against the flow of these streams so they can spawn. Bears grow comradely and line the riverbanks to welcome the salmon home. They can reach into the water and snatch at fat salmon with their paws. A fair catch might be 40 such fish, which they ferry off into different parts of the forest.

No bear needs hundreds of kilograms of salmon in a day. They choose the tastiest morsels: a smidgeon of brain maybe, perhaps a liver. The rest is left to break into constituent nutrients. Fat joins with protein and nitrogen and phosphorus to ooze into the forest floor, where the roots of trees suck them up. Those fish that do manage to spawn upriver will also die. Bald eagles, mice, deer, jays, ravens, crows, insects — so many different creatures feast on the bounty to carry the nutrients further. Salmon forests deliver more wood per hectare than any other forests on Earth, trees growing tall and broad. It’s remarkable. Salmon become the trees that protect the salmon, through the mediation of bears.2

Michael’s lawsuits were buying time for Admiralty Island; the aim was to file suit after suit, and register appeals if anything lost, whatever it cost. It took more than four years: through the end of the Nixon administration and the election of Jimmy Carter to the presidency, when he declared Admiralty Island a national monument.

For a philanthropist like Michael, this victory had the same thrill as raking in Microsoft shares in its early Seattle years might for an investor. His hundreds of thousands of dollars might have bought a few acres and conserved it that way. Instead, he had funded litigation — and saved a million acres of some of the most precious wilderness on Earth. This philanthropist was hooked. Environmental litigation was where it was at.