You may recall the controversy a couple of decades ago when the northern spotted owl gained protection under the Endangered Species Act, and logging was banned across millions of acres of forested lands in the Pacific Northwest.
The thinking behind that ban was that man’s harvesting of timber in the region must have been what was causing the spotted owl’s numbers to decrease. It was assumed, therefore, that protecting the forest would protect the owl, and that the species would rebound. The loss of logging jobs by the thousands was considered by environmentalists to be a price worth paying to protect the spotted owl.
Well, those workers lost their jobs, but the spotted owl is now in even more danger.
Here is how McClatchy Newspapers put it in a recent article: “Twenty years after northern spotted owls were protected under the Endangered Species Act, their numbers continue to decline, and scientists aren’t certain whether the birds will survive even though logging was banned on much of the old-growth forest in the Pacific Northwest where they live in order to save them.”
The head of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s effort to help the owls recover said there was only slight evidence that the ban had done any good.
It seems nature did not cooperate with the federal government’s big plans to stabilize and increase populations of spotted owls. The extremely aggressive barred owl has been moving into the region in high numbers, displacing its much more placid cousin, the spotted owl.
The end result? “Regionwide, the owl populations are dropping 2.9 percent a year. In Washington state, they’re declining at 6 to 7 percent a year,” McClatchy reported.
“Nothing we do seems to work for the spotted owl,” said Eric Forsman, a research wildlife biologist with the U.S. Forest Service’s Pacific Northwest Research Station. He should know. He has been studying the spotted owl for 42 years.
So in the end, the spotted owl could disappear – just like all those logging jobs that were destroyed by misguided environmental policies.
Is it any wonder that the American people are suspicious of so many alarmist claims by environmental activists – and by the “solutions” those alarmists propose?