As Owls Go, So Goes the Forest

Compared with the foreign debt or tax reform, environmental issues generally seem simple. Wastes foul the ocean. Industrial emissions pollute the air. Chemicals deplete the ozone layer.

But even environmental matters often are reduced to overly simplistic battle lines as one side or the other attempts to gain the emotional advantage of public support. A prime example is the fight over the cutting of old-growth national forests in the Pacific Northwest. From the timber industry’s standpoint, the environmentalists want to bring a giant industry to its knees and throw innocent loggers out of work just to save a few reclusive owls.

True, the fate of the northern spotted owl is the legal flash-point of the controversy over cutting the old-growth forests in Washington, Oregon and Northern California. Environmental groups have won court injunctions against further cutting on certain federal forest lands until experts can determine the nature of the threat to the owl, which is protected under federal law.

But the issue is far broader and deeper than owls versus jobs or owls against people. The viability of the owl is a symptom of the health of the whole forest. If the owl is disappearing, then something basic is wrong with the forest. If the forest is so severely threatened, then the public must decide whether something should be done to save it.

The law is supposed to do that now. That is the process established in a variety of federal statutes passed in the past two decades. But legislators in the Northwest are seeking to circumvent this process by voiding the court injunctions and precluding any further legal action on the proposed cutting of 10 million board feet of old-growth forests through the coming fiscal year. Such a provision was inserted by the Senate into the Interior appropriations bill that now awaits negotiations in a Senate-House conference committee.

Environmental law was written to provide long-term protection of the nation’s natural resources, not to expedite their economic exploitation for short-term profits. That law should not be voided or short-circuited now.