Word: owl
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...dispute over the owl has festered more than 15 years, a period in which the ancient forests receded ever farther and the timbering continued largely unabated. Efforts to find a solution were thwarted by the power of the timber industry, the bungling and inertia of the federal bureaucracy and the stridency of an environmental movement as quick to alienate as to persuade. But the conflict should never have reached the current crisis point. Forest ranger Schindler believes the coming economic turmoil might have been averted if the Government had weaned industry from its dependence on old growth by gradually reducing...
...Forest Service biologist Eric Forsman, who has studied the owl since 1968, believes it was the strategy of the federal agencies to stall for time by continually asking for more studies on the owl. "I've seen how the games are played," says Forsman. BLM in particular ignored repeated alarms. As < early as 1976, BLM biologist Mayo Call warned his superiors that unless swift action was taken to protect the owl, it might one day have to be put on the endangered-species list, curtailing timber harvests on federal lands...
...Fish and Wildlife Service, which is charged with protecting species, refused to call for the owl to be listed as endangered until a federal court in 1988 judged that refusal to be "arbitrary and capricious." Later the General Accounting Office discovered that Fish and Wildlife officials had rewritten portions of a major study, expunging critical references suggesting the owl was endangered. One biologist said he felt pressured to "sanitize the report." For years, economics and politics, not biology, have controlled the decisions of BLM, the Forest Service and Fish and Wildlife...
...controversy offers the U.S. an opportunity to reassess the cost of past profligacy and salvage what remains of a treasured legacy of wildlife and ancient forest. Neither the owl nor the timbermen are served by further governmental inaction or sham solutions. What is gained by waiting until the last fir topples, the owl slips closer to extinction, or the mills finally retool or shut down because there are no more old-growth trees available? The lesson of the owl is not that environmental and economic concerns are incompatible, but that the longer society lacks the political courage...
There is no way to avoid hard choices. The U.S. will have to recognize that no society can have it all at all times -- unfettered harvesting of natural resources, full employment and a healthy and rich environment. The soft hoot of the owl, an ancient symbol of wisdom and foresight, beckons us to resolve both its future...