Shooting Barred Owls to Save Spotted Owls

Barred owls shot by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in order to save populations of the Northern spotted owl.

Forest managers in the Pacific Northwest are facing a tough decision. Environmentalists shut down logging in the national forests in the1980s and 1990s in order to save the Northern spotted owl. Considered an indicator species by biologists, meaning that a given species is studied and assumed to be indicative of the health of species throughout the ecosystem, this sensitive owl needs old growth forest to survive. Overlogging and deforestation sent spotted owl numbers plummeting. Federal courts forced the government to list the owl under the Endangered Species Act, which closed off the remaining old growth forest in the Northwest to logging.

In the last 20 years, spotted owl numbers have not recovered. This is largely because of the arrival of the more aggressive and closely related barred owl. Many scientists believe the barred owl is little different from the spotted owl, perhaps only separated by a few thousand years of living in different forests. The natural westward migration of the barred owl has threatened spotted owl populations both because the barred owl both mates with spotted owls and often eats them.

In response, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has made the decision to start shooting barred owls in order to protect the spotted owl.

This is a terrible idea.

Barred owls are a native species that migrated to the Northwest on their own and are competing with other owls for survival. There's nothing here that deserves human intervention.

Of course, we manage our environments intensively. We make all sorts of decisions that favor one species over another. So it's hardly a stretch for biologists to imagine managing this species as well. But this is precisely the wrong way to manage a forest.

Moreover, it's almost certain to be a futile endeavor. Barred owls are going to continue seeing the spotted owl dominated areas as perfect habitat. Were this to work, it would have to be an effort without a foreseeable end and for a point of unclear ethics.

On the other hand, there's been a lot of blood and tears sweated over the spotted owl. The government found itself caught flat-footed over the spotted owl and struggled to deal with the regional implications. The decision to shoot barred owls suggests that this is a political rather than biological decision; the point of the spotted owl was not so much the save the owl per se as to preserve the last bits of an ecologically rich forest. Environmentalists are split on the decision to shoot the barred owl--some see it as necessary to protect the species they've invested so much in while others view it as opposed to everything in which they believe. 

However, local politicians in the timber belt still don't get it either. They are chomping at the bit for the spotted owl to be eliminated, thinking that will reopen the forests to logging and that 1985 will return. That's not going to happen. Even if the spotted owl went extinct, environmentalists would find another species to get listed under the Endangered Species Act because, again, the point of the indicator species is that if it's declining, it's quite the entire ecosystem is under attack. That was certainly the case with old-growth forests and the timber industry in the 1980s.

This is just kind of depressing. That pan full of dead owls made me sad.

Bush's Death Sentence To Spotted Owls Likely To Be Overturned

Not surprisingly, Obama's Interior Department is reconsidering Bush's order to open up northern spotted owl habitat in the Pacific Northwest to commercial logging. They are justifying this by pointing to political interference in scientific reports by Bush administration officials.

Certainly this is a good thing. Commercial logging is not the future of the Northwestern economy. Logging is so automated now that relatively few jobs would be created by easing spotted owl protections. Moreover, it could drive this very sensitive species significantly closer to extinction.

On the other hand, logging restrictions in the Northwest are really only a good thing if we don't simply replace that logging with trees from some other forest. We have to cut consumption to make environmental regulations effective. As it is, I can't help but wonder if we aren't engaging in a form of environmental imperialism, exporting our production needs to places where we can't see the damage, while benefiting from destroying land and people elsewhere.

Economic Transition and Environmentalism in the Pacific Northwest

William Yardley's piece in today's Times on the shift in the Pacific Northwest away from a logging economy and its effects on the timber industry is worth reading. As the much-in-demand expert on logging here at Alterdestiny, I figure I should probably comment on it. And I do have a few points to make:

1. These changes are the back side of a process that started decades ago. After World War II, the United States Forest Service decided to serve timber companies over all other users of the forest. Combined with the postwar housing crisis, there was little incentive to treat the forest as a sustainable resource, thus leading to massive overcutting. The decline of virgin forests coincided with the rise of environmentalism and with the development of ecology as a respected scientific field. In the 1980s, these scientists documented the decline of the northern spotted owl in the forests, widely believed to be an indicator species. At the same time, the Reagan administration ordered full speed ahead cutting in the forests, placing the future of the species in doubt. The environmental groups took the scientific information and sued the timber companies and federal government, eventually ending most logging in the National Forests.

The larger point here is that the changes Yardley describes have a long history. Ever since the late 1980s, timber towns have dealt with a new economic reality, one without limitless logging. Many of them have faded, suffering economic depression and declining population. There is nothing new about any of this and I'm surprised Yardley didn't reference this past except in passing.

2. Not surprisingly, the loggers are reacting in a variety of ways to these changes. In the 80s and 90s, there was widespread hostility toward environmentalists. Much of this was irrational hate and misplaced anger, but much was also a result of openly hostile and anti-humanist behavior by the environmental community. Those days are long gone though. And while many loggers long for the days of unregulated logging, others are seeing the economic opporutnities of a post-logging economy, where the trees make you money in ways other than cutting them down. This is interesting and I think touches on a very important issue deep within many loggers' souls--love of nature.

In my not soon to be forthcoming (2013 maybe?) book, "The Battle for the Body: Work and Environment in the Pacific Northwest Lumber Industry," I argue that loggers cared about nature and that their relationships with nature shaped their lives and especially their labor relations. But of course, while they might have loved nature, they had to eat and that meant cutting down trees. Loggers frequently expressed sorrow over their actions. But what were they to do?

Today, there's other alternatives. See this quote by Harold Jones, of Lowell, Oregon. This town, 10 minutes from where I grew up, has long been under total control of the timber industry. But today, Jones says:

“The only money I’ve ever made is cutting down trees,” Mr. Jones, 75, said just after coming in from thinning the stand of Douglas firs he has planted on 125 acres he owns here in Lowell. “So what I’ve tried to do in my retirement is to try to bring back and repay the Earth for a lot of the devastation I’ve caused it.”

Mr. Jones started logging in 1948 and has long rolled his eyes at “countercultural types” who protest timber sales. Yet in front of his property now are signs saying “Certified Family Forest.”

This is interesting. It's my contention that loggers, even as they love nature, do not fit into traditional environmentalist categories of "conservationist" or "preservationist." In fact, I think these categories are extremely limiting and should be tossed out, yet most environmental historians still use them. The problem with these terms is that they only describe people who are in the environmental movement in some way. What about the millions of people who aren't "environmentalists?" How do we characterize their relationship with nature? In Jones' case, here is a man who loves nature and who admits that he has caused great damage to the planet. But he had to eat. He's 75 and the only way he's ever made money is by cutting down trees. Now he sees a different way and is embracing it, even while he shows clear contempt for "environmentalists." This kind of feeling is common among loggers, many of whom, past and present, love nature while also being dismayed at the culture of environmentalists, with their dismissal of the need to work in nature and their embracing of the counterculture.

3. Finally, a word needs to be said about consumption. I am glad logging has declined in my home state. It's a beautiful place. Clearcuts are horrid scars upon the land, designed to maximize profit for large corporations. This kind of logging well-served neither nature nor working-class people. But while the environmental community did good things by ending the ravages of logging upon the land, they said little about consumption. Recycling was always mentioned but that's limited and really is about reuse rather than outright declines in consumption patterns. Restriction without less consumption simply means that the logging in Oregon moved to other places--Indonesia, Brazil, Canada, Alabama, Alaska, New Zealand, etc. Those forests are still getting destroyed by logging. Why? Because we demand two-ply toilet paper, endless supplies of printer paper, etc., etc. I love my Oregon forests. But I love all forests in the world just as much. I don't want to destroy virgin boreal forest in Canada or rain forest in Brazil for my consumer demands. Yet we don't talk much about this 900 lb. gorilla. And that I think needs to be the next frontier in environmental communities--the fight against consumption.

Jackson County, Oregon

Jackson County is not a good place. Although it has the semi-major southern Oregon regional center of Medford, the county has never adjusted to a post-timber economy. In response, Jackson County has closed all 15 of its libraries for lack of funding. Josephine and Curry counties, also in southwestern Oregon, face similar funding declines. All of these counties face tax increases in order to continue basic services.

Of course, local residents blame the decline of the timber industry for these problems. There is some truth in this idea, but it is far more complicated than they care to admit. County Commissioner Dennis C.W. Smith remarks, “The real problem is this segment of absolutists that will not tolerate any use of federal lands for timber resources." This is a less than veiled slap at the environmental community that filed lawsuits which helped severely curtail the timber industry throughout the Northwest in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Smith represents the thoughts of many, but they are wrong. What they don't understand is that the timber industry in the Northwest would be virtually dead now anyway. Globalization was already destroying the region before the spotted owl crisis put the final nail in the industry's economy. An increasing number of raw logs were shipped overseas and cheaper timber was pouring in from British Columbia, New Zealand, the American South, and the tropics. Like many regional industries, timber in the Northwest can't compete in a globalized economy. If the government stripped away all sense of environmental regulation, it is true that the region would see a brief economic revival, but that would be the calm before the storm of its complete collapse when all the timber was gone.

Most importantly in understanding the history of this problem is that the timber industry used the spotted owl crisis to get out of the Northwest. They could blame all these mill closures on environmentalists while moving their operations worldwide. Few timber workers saw that their real enemy was not the environmentalists, who like the timber workers, wanted to see trees remain in the region forever. The enemy was the big timber companies who had severely overcut the region beginning after World War II and reaching a crescendo in the 1980s. All of this undermined the ecological base of the forest, leading to the spotted owl lawsuits and the end of the regional industry. Of course, many small operators did lose everything. But the big multinational corporations that had slowly gained a stranglehold over lumber production over the previous decades did just fine.

Americans still get their wood supplies and they are cheaper than ever. The only people hurt by this were the timber workers of the Northwest. For them, I feel bad. But like old mining towns such as Butte and Leadville, Coquille, Bandon, and Medford need to understand that the industry is not coming back. For them to survive, they need to develop alternative economies. Ashland has done quite well. With Southern Oregon State University and the Shakespeare Festival, they have figured out how to create a successful economy without timber. Others have turned to tourism, which is increasingly tenable, particularly along the Rogue River. It is hard for people to change their ways after growing up understanding that the timber would also be around. Maybe the government needs to play a bigger role in transforming these areas, although they have been involved pretty heavily since the beginning of the Clinton administration. In any case though, it's time to move on.

Of course, there is actually a pretty damn active alternative economy in southwestern Oregon. That is marijuana. Southwestern Oregon and northwestern California provides a huge amount of pot for the nation. Of course, none of this is taxed. But when people talk of the economic decline of the region, they don't mention the very active and lucrative underground economy.

Thanks a ton to Maggie for sending this along

When Workers Get Desperate

I was saddened to be forwarded this post on Oregon fishermen shooting sea lions because they view them as salmon killers. Of course, sea lions naturally kill salmon. They survive on salmon, among other things.

Thanks to the massive reengineering of the Columbia River basin however, salmon populations are in collapse. Despite (and in large part because of) all the attempts to construct fish hatcheries, fish ladders, and other technological solutions, the wild salmon population is near extinction in much of the Pacific Northwest. The fishing industry therefore has collapsed as well. The Northwest has a precedent for this kind of thing. When the spotted owl controversy was in full force, loggers were shooting owls (and only sometimes did they actually shoot a spotted owl) and posting them on fences and such to show that people came before animals.

In both of these cases, working class people who live off the land have targeted their anger at animal species who did not deserve it. Rather, both the massive cutting of old-growth timber and the decline in salmon populations have happened directly because of human activities, including (but by no means exclusively) workers changing the environment each and every day.

The salmon industry is dead. Shooting sea lions isn't going to make it come back. If we're lucky, and I don't think we will be, wild salmon will not actually become extinct in the majority of the Northwest. But again, the chances of that happening seem to me almost nil.

Of course, idiot Washington Republican congressman Doc Hastings wants to change the law to make killing sea lions legal again.

I highly suggest reading more on this topic, particularly Joseph Taylor's Making Salmon: An Environmental History of the Northwest Fisheries Crisis. Taylor documents how people created a river system where wild salmon can no longer survive.