Lately the newspapers have been full of stories about how the spotted owl is going to turn the Pacific Northwest into a land of ghost towns while forcing people in the rest of the country to live under bridges or in old refrigerator cartons. The problem, according to the stories, is that a lawsuit brought by the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund and other groups caused a federal judge to block logging on millions of acres of federally owned old-growth forests in Oregon, Washington, and northern California.
But is the situation really the way the timber industry portrays it? Are all those jobs really being sacrificed to the owl? Are housing costs going to rise to the point where a noticeable number of people are prevented from owning or renting decent housing? There is good reason to believe that the answer to all these questions is no.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
The spotted owl case is really about stopping the cutting before the old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwest reach the point where they are as nonfunctional as the prairie remnants of Illinois. The owl is an indicator species, a species totally dependent on old-growth forests, a species that can tell us how the whole ecosystem is doing. The best information we have says that spotted owl populations in the northwest have dropped 80 percent since the big cut began on public lands after World War II.
Ordinary market forces are playing a part too, as lumber from the northwest faces competition from the mechanized tree farmers of the southeastern U.S. Northwestern loggers have also been receiving a huge public subsidy, since they are cutting timber on public land and paying such low rates for it that the U.S. Forest Service often spends more building access roads to get to the timber than it receives from the sale of the logs.
There are two bills currently in the U.S. House of Representatives that would be a start toward thinking in terms of ecosystems. HR 1590, introduced by Congressman Bruce Vento of Minnesota, calls for the establishment of a 6.3-million-acre Ancient Forest Reserve System in the northwest. It also mandates the establishment of an ancient-forest research program and a program to experiment with logging techniques that would not destroy the forest. As an aid to the logging towns, it would offer economic assistance and retraining for communities and individuals. Another bill, HR 842, introduced by Congressman James Jontz of Indiana, would create a large reserve that would include parts of northern California, Oregon, Washington, and Alaska, though it would not provide economic assistance.
