The Complex Lesson of the Spotted Owl

Last year biologists declared the spotted owl in danger of extinction, in large part because so much of its natural forest home in the Pacific Northwest has vanished in a flurry of chain saws. But does Washington give a hoot about the spotted owl? The chocolate-brown bird with white spots and wide-set eyes is about to find out, but it still could face an uphill fight for survival.

The U.S. Interior Department’s Fish and Wildlife Service has identified 14.6 million acres of timberland in California, Oregon and Washington as prime habitat for the owl. The targeted habitat area includes about 3 million acres already off-limits to logging because it is park land, but the acreage goes well beyond any amount the worried timber industry thought remotely possible.

Even so, not all of the acreage will be the monopoly preserve of the 3,000 surviving pairs of spotted owls, or even off-limits to loggers. Fish and Wildlife officials will make acreage decisions based on whether the economic costs to companies and workers of felling any particular stand of trees will outweigh the benefits of sparing the owl.

The timber industry is traumatized. Even before John Turner, director of the service, could pick his cost-benefit analysis team, his own economists were spreading dismal news for timber workers. Protecting the spotted owl, they said, would cost 40,000 jobs in the lumber business, more than half again the size of earlier estimates.

Maybe; but more often than not, cost-benefit analysis is a highly subjective exercise. Results so often depend on what is considered important and what is not. For example, will the costs in terms of jobs be adjusted to reflect the fact that jobs in ancient forests won’t last long anyway, because those trees are headed for extinction like the owl? And how will the formula reflect the mitigating effects of the all-important job retraining programs for loggers that the federal government will finance?

Moreover, any fair study of benefits would focus on the diversity in nature that survival of a species enhances. And what about the benefits to humans from preservation of ancient trees, and of the land as it has been for centuries? What benefits derive from free-flowing rivers, free of the silty dregs of erosion that too often accompany the practice of forestry?

In the long battle over the spotted owl’s survival, two important lessons have emerged, one perhaps less obvious than the other: that more sophisticated forestry practices are essential not only to guarantee adequate lumber supplies, but also to preserve forests for wildlife and for people just passing through.