A new owl plan with the same old goal: more logging

What will President Obama do about the Northern Spotted Owl? He — or his opponent — will be the fifth president to deal with the threatened bird and the old-growth forests in which it lives. Many people assumed that the owl wars had ended when the Clinton administration's Northwest Forest Plan took effect in 1994. But then, many people assumed that European wars had ended when the Treaty of Versailles was signed in 1918.

In the late 1980s and early '90s, the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush tried to keep from disrupting the flow of National Forest timber to protect the owl. They got hammered in federal court. The government listed the owl as threatened in 1990. The next year, U.S. District Judge William Dwyer enjoined all federal timber sales west of the Cascade crest.

During the 1992 campaign, Bill Clinton promised that he'd bring all parties together to find a solution to the owl problem. In 1993, he convened a Portland conference at which he, Vice President Al Gore, and four cabinet secretaries heard from scientists, loggers, mill owners, and timber town officials. His administration subsequently issued a Northwest Forest Plan designed to protect not only owls but also hundreds of other critters that need or at least spend time in old growth forests. Both the industry and environmentalists attacked the plan, but the courts gave it a green light.

Ever since Clinton left office, George W. Bush's administration has tried to undercut protection for the owl and its habitat. Memos that Earthjustice obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show that the forest products industry wanted the Bush administration to modify environmental rules for Northwest forests. Reducing habitat protection for the owl and marbled murrelet — which was listed in 1992 — were keys. The industry also wanted the Bush administration to eliminate old growth protection on BLM land in Oregon and northern California; dump the Forest Plan's Aquatic Strategy, designed to protect salmon; and get rid of its requirement to "survey and manage" for the survival of fungi, invertebrates, and other species protected by the Forest Plan. The administration has tried to oblige. Courts have slapped down its efforts to scrap the aquatic strategy and "survey and manage," and to de-list the murrelet.

The goal is to cut 1.1 billion board feet a year in the Northwest's federal forests, roughly three times the going rate. The administration has argued that when the Northwest Forest Plan was adopted, Clinton "promised" the forest products industry a billion board feet of timber a year. "We're trying to go back to those original promises," Undersecretary of Agriculture Mark Rey told The Seattle Times. "We're not ready to walk away from the communities in the Northwest to which promises were made." Ray explained five years ago that "I went back and reviewed the record to make sure I wasn't misreading" Clinton's comments. He read transcripts and listened to tapes and found that Clinton had not been misquoted. "What I've been ordered to do," Rey said, "is redeem a commitment, an unambiguous and unequivocal commitment, by the Clinton administration."

As its latest step toward redemption, the Bush administration in May issued a final recovery plan for the Northern Spotted Owl. Some environmentalists assume it's dead on arrival. Don't be too sure.

Two years ago, the administration put together a team to write a draft recovery plan. The government had started a plan back in 1992 but never finished, assuming that the Northwest Forest Plan would do the trick. Then, early on, the Bush administration settled — rather than fighting — industry lawsuits by promising, among other things, to conduct a status review of the spotted owl. Many environmentalists expected the status review to "prove" that the owl was doing just fine. Instead, the reviewers said that owl populations were plummeting faster than anyone had anticipated, that the invasive barred owl posed a significant threat, and that disease and climate change further jeopardized the owl's survival.

The draft recovery plan might have built on the status review, tailoring owl protection to an uncertain world. It didn't. Politics played a part from the beginning. An oversight committee of Agriculture and Interior department officials second-guessed the recovery team; the draft claimed that barred owls posed more of a threat than habitat loss. It included two options — the first time a draft plan had ever done that. Option two would have scrapped owl reserves with fixed boundaries so that forest managers could protect habitat as they saw fit. It also called for experimentally shotgunning up to 576 barred owls.

Two environmentalists on the recovery team, Washington Audubon biologist Tim Cullinan and Dominick DellaSalla of the Ashland, Ore.-based National Center for Conservation Science & Policy, went to Washington, D.C., to talk with congressional staffers about what the administration had done. As Cullinan recalls, the press had just run stories about political interference with other Endangered Species Act decisions, and they found a lot of receptive ears. Interested members of Congress applied enough political pressure to secure scientific reviews of the draft plan. The scientists ripped it to shreds. There was no way the administration could take its draft into court and expect to win. It went back to the drawing board.