Congress Is New Battlefield Over Fate of Threatened Spotted Owl : Environmentalists’ court victories did not end the debate. Industry has turned to lawmakers.

It is a timid creature of quiet places, the northern spotted owl, and it has little tolerance for the clatter of civilization.

So one must assume the owls tremble at the roar of the men, women, judges, politicians, activists, experts, loggers, lawyers, sob sisters, do-gooders, profiteers, publicists and assorted other characters who are arguing with growing fury for the high ground in the owl’s home, the old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwest.

One year ago, the Interior Department designated the owl a threatened species. That was only the beginning of the battle.

If you are (a) confused, (b) bewildered and (c) perplexed about the owl and what is happening in the quest to save it, you are, well, probably just human.

Even seasoned experts grant you that the fight to save the shy bird from extinction is uncommonly dense and bitter--perhaps because its outcome will determine the very landscape of the timber-rich Northwest.

The overwhelming view of science is that the shy creature needs space in the mature forests away from logging and development. But beyond that, virtually no one stands as a credible, dispassionate neutral observer.

“I can absolutely guarantee you that confusion is rampant,” says David Thorud, dean of the College of Forest Resources at the University of Washington. “Everyone has a view or an idea or an ax to grind.”

All of this comes to mind in the excited aftermath of two federal court decisions in Seattle.

Two District Court judges in separate actions brought by the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund found that after declaring the owl endangered, the Bush Administration failed in its legal obligations to protect the bird.

One judge ordered the U.S. Forest Service to halt the sale of 66,000 acres of timber in Northern California, Oregon and Washington until it produced a plan to prevent extinction of the owl.

The other judge ordered the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to live up to the law and officially designate which forest habitat is critical for the bird’s survival--a process it subsequently undertook although with questionable craftsmanship.

The two courts denounced the Administration in scathing language. One decision charged that the government had engaged in “a deliberate and systematic refusal . . . to comply with the laws protecting wildlife” and the other decision held that the Administration had “abused its discretion.”

In short, the judges found that the Bush Administration was willing to risk pushing the owl over the brink of extinction rather than act commandingly to save it.

The courtroom victories by environmentalists have not settled the matter, however. To the contrary, the court orders seemed to intensify already polarized emotions.

Timber companies and timber workers, now enduring their fourth painful year of regional strife over the owl and logging, let off more mournful protests. By Wednesday of this week, timber officials were calculating an incredible, perhaps too incredible, 93,000 jobs were in danger in the region.

This is now mostly background sound effects. The real action has moved to Washington, where the industry has dropped its case in the lap of Congress, arguing that the owl is not really threatened after all, and that the Endangered Species Act needs to be tempered to preserve jobs.

Environmentalists saw the shift in venue coming and say they are prepared to do battle in the Capitol, too.

“These job-loss claims are a sham. We proved that in court and we’ll prove it in front of Congress,” says Vic Sher, the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund’s managing attorney for the Northwest. “The industry’s prescription is not only for extinction of the owl, but for gutting every major environmental law governing our public lands.”

Maybe that is the fight that some wanted all along.

Indeed, there is mounting suspicion today in the Northwest that the Bush Administration deliberately--and therefore callously--did not act to protect the owl in order to court a full-blown crisis that would soften up Congress for a revision of America’s complex environmental laws--particularly the Endangered Species Act.

Rep. Peter A. DeFazio (D-Ore.) recently said he suspected the Bush Administration had engineered a “crisis by design.”

“We haven’t located the smoking gun,” he told the Portland Oregonian newspaper in an interview. “But Administration officials are up to their knees in empty cartridge casings and there’s a heavy smell of cordite.”