Scientists Give Congress 14 Plans for Saving Owl

A scientific panel Wednesday gave Congress a wide range of options for saving the northern spotted owl, but it warned that there is “no free lunch” when balancing economic activity and environmental protection in the oldest forests of the Pacific Northwest.

The four scientists on the panel, which was commissioned by two House committees to make recommendations on protecting the owl, offered 14 options. Most called for dramatic logging cutbacks in order to offset years of excessive timber harvests in the region’s national forests.

They concluded that existing management of the region’s national forests places the threatened owl, the marbled murrelet and other old-growth wildlife at the risk of extinction.

“We looked hard and we don’t think there is an alternative that provides abundant timber harvests and species protection,” said John Gordon, dean of the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale University.

“We don’t think there is any free lunch,” he said at a news conference.

One of the choices would cut back Northwest logging to less than one-fourth of traditional levels, to as low as 750 million board feet a year, and provide protection for troubled salmon runs in the Columbia River Basin as well as the threatened spotted owl.

That approach would cost the region a minimum of 60,000 jobs from the 1985-89 average, with much more unemployment possible if the prescribed protection was extended to private lands as well as federal forests, said K. Norman Johnson, a forest management professor at Oregon State University.

At the “high timber yield” end of the range of choices, logging could continue at near traditional levels, as high as 5 billion board feet annually, at the cost of as few as 2,000 jobs, the committee said.

“The first four or five options violate the daylights out of the Endangered Species Act,” said Rep. Sid Morrison (R-Wash.). “I get the feeling what we’ve been thinking all these years is true. We have some tough decisions to make.”

Rep. George Miller (D-Martinez), chairman of the House Interior Committee, said he hopes that Congress can adopt some solution this year.

Environmentalists responded favorably, and timber industry leaders disapproved.

“In the mad rush to protect owls, murrelets, salmon, ecosystems and other life forms, we are forgetting one particular species--Homo sapiens,” said Mark Rey, executive director of the American Forest Resource Alliance.

Jim Blomquist of the Sierra Club said the report should serve as a “wake-up call for Congress.”

The scientists were asked to look at the issue by the Agriculture Committee, which has jurisdiction over national forests, and the Merchant Marine and Fisheries Committee.