The timber industry is celebrating a
court decision which forces the federal government to take another
look at the most controversial of old-growth forest dwellers: the
northern spotted owl and the marbled murrelet.
Timber
industry groups sued the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for failing
to reassess the population and habitat of the birds, as required by
the Endangered Species Act. Habitat protections are keeping loggers
away from timber promised to them under President Clinton’s
Northwest Forest Plan, according to Tom Partin, president of the
American Forest Resource Council: “We just want better access
to federal wood.”
The Fish and Wildlife Service is
required to do a scientific review of threatened and endangered
species every five years, but “we do not have the luxury of
doing reviews often,” says Joan Jewett, a Fish and Wildlife
Service spokeswoman. “We are buried in work keeping up with
designating new species and their habitat.”
The
January court decision orders a new study of the owl’s
numbers by next December and final proposals for protecting forest
habitat by December 2005, for the owl, and 2006, for the
murrelet.
Kristen Boyles of the Seattle office of
Earthjustice doubts the threatened status of the owl and murrelet
will change, but she fears the new review will lead to logging in
forests now protected as critical habitat.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Spotted owl back under microscope.
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