Spotted Owl Policy Might Not Have Worked While It Destroyed Jobs

See Environmentalist Wisdom: Shoot One Owl to Save The Other: The feds take sides in the battle between spotted owls and barred owls by JAMES L. HUFFMAN, WSJ 7-30-11. Mr. Huffman, dean emeritus of Lewis & Clark Law School, is a member of the Hoover Institution's task force on Property Rights, Freedom and Prosperity.

Excerpts:

"Two decades after millions of acres of federal forests in the Northwest were virtually closed to logging, with devastating consequences for a once flourishing timber industry, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has issued its "final" plan to save the owl.

No one really expects the strategy to work—not even those who first brought attention to the plight of the spotted owl. As Forest Service biologist Eric Forsman told the New York Times last month, "If you'd asked me in 1975, 'Can we fix this problem?' I'd have said, 'Oh yeah, this problem will go away.'" But he says he's grown "much less confident as the years have gone by."

And for good reason. Despite a 90% cutback in harvesting on federal lands (which constitute 46% of Oregon and Washington combined), the population of spotted owls continues to decline, as do rural communities that once prospered across the Northwest. In some areas, spotted owls are vanishing at a rate of 9% per year, while on average the rate is 3%.

In the 1980s, before the owl was listed as threatened, nearly 200 sawmills dotted the state of Oregon, churning out eight billion board feet of federal timber a year. Today fewer than 80 mills process only 600 million board feet of federal timber. In Douglas County, for example, several mills dependent on federal timber have closed. Real unemployment in many Oregon counties exceeds 20%, double the national average.

Meanwhile, vast unmanaged federal forests have become immense fire traps. The 2002 Biscuit Fire in southern Oregon and northern California burned 500,000 acres, cost $150 million to fight, and destroyed $5 billion worth of timber. It also resulted in the deaths of an estimated 75 pairs of spotted owls.

The final Revised Recovery Plan, issued on June 30, calls for expanding protections for owls beyond the nearly six million acres currently set aside. Ironically, it also calls for the "removal"—i.e., shooting—of hundreds of barred owls, a larger and more adaptable rival of the spotted owl that competes for prey and nesting sites, and sometimes breeds with the spotted owl.

How much will it cost to implement this plan? The Fish and Wildlife Service says the species could be rejuvenated over the next 30 years at a cost of about $127 million. But that money will do little if anything to rejuvenate the depressed rural communities of the Northwest where still more timber land will be off limits to harvesting."