Word: owl
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...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...
...Oregon congressional delegation in 1990 to deal rationally with the end of ancient-forest cutting is like asking the Mississippi delegation in 1960 to deal rationally with the end of segregation," he says. He is not a humorless crusader though. Accused by loggers of looking like a spotted owl, Kerr retorted, "That really ruffles my feathers...
With thousands of jobs and whole communities at stake, the timber industry asks how the U.S. can afford to save the northern spotted owl and the forest it inhabits. Environmentalists, fearful the rich legacy of old growth will vanish, wonder how we can afford...