Plan to Protect Owls Submitted Despite Projected Loss of Jobs

The Forest Service complied Thursday with a court order that it protect the northern spotted owl, restricting logging across 5.9 million acres at a projected cost of tens of thousands of jobs in the Northwest.

The agency submitted its new owl management plan to U.S. District Judge William Dwyer of Seattle, who a year ago accused the Forest Service of a “deliberate and systematic refusal” to follow environmental laws.

The owl protection plan covers an area of Northwest national forests that is larger than the state of Massachusetts. Combined with other market forces in a changing timber industry, it will cost the region more than 30,000 jobs by 1995, as logging falls to less than half the average annual level of the 1980s, the service said.

“This plan was considered the most appropriate after all factors were weighed,” said Assistant Agriculture Secretary James Moseley, who oversees the Forest Service. “We can maintain viable populations of the spotted owl while allowing some timber to be harvested to support the economy of communities dependent on the national forests.”

By 1995, the smaller timber harvests will be producing about 34,000 fewer jobs than did the larger harvest levels of the past decade, the agency said in its latest economic analysis, dated Feb. 5.

The economists also noted, however, that even without the special owl strategy, the Forest Service was anticipating logging cutbacks in the 1990s that would cost about 12,000 jobs, due partly to the automation of sawmills.

Dwyer banned logging across all national forests with spotted owls last March and gave the Forest Service until Thursday to come up with a scientifically credible plan to keep alive the 3,000 remaining pairs of threatened birds.