Environmentalists Call for Lujan to Quit Over Owl

A national environmental group accused the Bush Administration on Wednesday of breaking forest-protection laws and called for the resignation of Interior Secretary Manuel Lujan Jr.

The president of the Wilderness Society, George T. Frampton Jr., said he will ask for a congressional investigation into the Administration’s handling of the threatened northern spotted owl.

Frampton told reporters that Lujan and White House officials have used political influence to try to allow for the logging in the spotted owl habitat, in violation of environmental laws.

Interior Department officials dismissed the criticism, saying the environmentalists were engaged in politicking of their own.

“The secretary has absolutely no plans to resign,” Lujan’s spokesman Steve Goldstein said.

Frampton criticized Lujan for inviting thousands of loggers to descend on a public hearing in Portland, Ore., on Wednesday before the special Cabinet-level panel deciding whether to exempt some logging from the Endangered Species Act.

“It is an intentional effort by . . . Lujan to corrupt the legal process and to use political muscle to compensate for the lack of any factual basis for overriding the Endangered Species Act,” Frampton said.

”. . . We have passed to subversion of the law and a call to the mob,” he said.

Lujan is the chairman of the Endangered Species Committee, known as the “God Squad.”

The panel can grant exemptions to the act if it decides the cost of saving a species from extinction is too great and there are no other alternatives.