Bush Flips Off Spotted Owls (and the Rest of Us)

How important are owls in the scheme of things? How important are forests? What do most Americans know about forests?

The answer to the last question is that most Americans think that the majority of forests are managed by the Forest Service or the Park Service. Most Americans also think that those forests are protected from logging.

Both answers are wrong. About 60 percent of the nation's forests are privately owned, and only a small percentage of forests on public land are protected from logging. In the Pacific Northwest, only about 15 percent of the original, native old-growth forest remains. Many people remember the battles over the last of big trees that took place in the 1980s and 90s, and assume that the treehuggers won and the old-growth forests are protected. They would be wrong about that too.

In 1993, a few months after Bill Clinton took office, he initiated the Northwest Forest Plan. That plan settled a lawsuit over the northern spotted owl by setting aside habitat for the owl. But it did not protect all of the remaining old-growth trees and it did not protect anything permanently. It was an administrative solution, vulnerable to the kind of underhanded, undermining tactics so typical of the Bush administration.

A few years ago, replicating a now widely used tactic, a group of timber companies sued the federal government over the spotted owl. Shedding crocodile tears of concern for the owl, whose numbers continue to decline, they claimed that the Northwest Forest Plan was at fault and that the US Fish and Wildlife Service needed to come up with a new species recovery plan. The result of that suit was a new critical habitat proposal, released on June 12, which actually reduces protected owl habitat by 23 percent - about 1.6 million acres.

The best owl habitat is forest with the biggest, oldest, most valuable trees. Could it be a coincidence that a Bush administration owl-recovery plan ends up making more trees available to timber companies?

I spoke with Dominick DellaSala, a scientist with the National Center for Conservation Science and Policy, who served on the Fish and Wildlife Service's owl-recovery plan committee. DellaSala testified to the House Natural Resources Committee at a May 9 hearing on "Endangered Species Implementation: Science or Politics?" about political interference in the recovery plan committee's work.

To start with, a committee that works on an endangered-species recovery plan is usually composed of scientific experts on that species, he said. In this case, only three out of the twelve committee members were biologists, and only one of those, a timber industry scientist, was a recognized owl expert.

Even so, the committee recommended a recovery strategy for the owl based on the Northwest Forest Plan, recognizing that the NWFP was itself based on the results of years of study showing that the owls' No. 1 need is for untouched old-growth forests. To make up for its deficiency in scientific expertise, the committee asked the US Fish and Wildlife Service to provide a structure for scientific peer review of their findings. Their request was denied. Instead of peer review, they got a political hack job.

Soon after submitting their recommendations, the owl-recovery committee was told that their plan would be scrutinized by a "Washington DC Oversight Committee," consisting of high-ranking officials from the departments of Agriculture and Interior. One of the members of this oversight committee was Deputy Assistant Interior Secretary Julie McDonald.

McDonald quit under fire on April 30, just before the House Resources Committee oversight hearing. An Interior Department Inspector General report had accused her of manipulating data on endangered species to produce results that would be more convenient for developers, miners, ranchers and loggers.