Senate Defeats Proposal to Log in Spotted Owl Habitat

The Senate defeated a proposal Thursday that would have waived the Endangered Species Act and allowed salvage logging in Northwest forests that are home to the rare spotted owl.

By a vote of 60 to 35, the Senate voted down an amendment to a 1993 Interior Department spending bill to let loggers harvest dead or dying trees in areas where the rare owl lives. Senators later approved the $12.6-billion appropriation bill on a voice vote.

Court injunctions have halted virtually all timber cutting on Northwest federal land until the government comes up with an acceptable plan to protect the owl, which was listed as a threatened species in 1990.

“What reason is there to override the Endangered Species Act?” asked Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell (D-Me.). “Any short-term relief that might be provided to the people of the Northwest by this amendment is likely only to intensify future injunctions.”

Northwest Republicans said salvage sales are necessary to aid unemployed loggers and clean up diseased timber that could add fuel to forest fires already raging in the West.

“Salvage . . . isn’t going to hurt (the owl), isn’t going to help it, but doesn’t meet the technical standards of the law,” said Sen. Bob Packwood (R-Ore.).

Saying the issue had come down to jobs versus owls, Packwood added: “Isn’t the choice this amendment poses eventually the choice we are going to have to make? The question is: Who is going to come down on the side of people?”

Opponents of the plan, offered by Sen. Slade Gorton (R-Wash.), said the Forest Service could salvage timber in wide areas of the Northwest unaffected by injunctions, adding such harvesting caused erosion and other environmental problems.