Archive for the ‘Pacific Northwest’ category

Baby steps vs. real reform

January 20th, 2011

Earlier this month, we wrote about Hal Salwasser, the dean of the School of Forestry at Oregon State University. Salwasser described in an Oregonian article how our federal forestland is suffering from neglect and no longer offers any economic or social value.

With a new spotted owl plan still being formulated by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the question of whether we should be thinning and selectively harvesting our federal forests in the West is especially pertinent.

Salwasser mentioned pilot projects in Western Oregon that are bringing timber companies, environmental groups and the federal government together to selectively harvest federal forestland, thin the forests to protect from wildfire and also create better habitat for the spotted owl.

The Medford Mail Tribune wrote last week about one of the projects in the Applegate Valley near Medford. The paper quoted local residents and government officials who were excited about a more collaborative approach to federal forestland.

“This is the kind of stuff we’ve been talking about for 20 years,” (said Jack Shipley, head of a community partnership that helped get the project off the ground.) “Instead of fighting about jobs versus owls, we all come to the table and have both. This will be ecologically driven but will include jobs.”

“…We have moved beyond the ‘cut or no-cut’ argument,” (Shipley) said. “We are saying there needs to be active management on the landscape. We want to move forward and do something proactive.

But Doug Robertson had a different take on the pilot projects in an insightful op-ed in the Capital Press. Robertson is the head of the Association of O&C Counties, a group of Oregon counties with a large amount of federal forestland.

In regard to the pilot projects, he said “while I am hopeful for success, my expectations are low.” Robertson added that the proposed new spotted owl plan — and current federal rules — make it almost impossible to smartly manage federal forestland.

He said he did not hear promising answers in a recent meeting with federal officials.

The spotted owl expert from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service made no mention of the barred owl, in spite of a growing consensus that a major threat to spotted owl survival is the larger, more aggressive and invasive barred owl.

When asked how the agency would deal with this threat, the expert said the barred owl could be trapped, but he admitted that he had contacted many agencies on the East Coast, where the barred owl originated, but none of the states contacted wanted any of their native barred owls returned to them. The spotted owl expert mentioned shooting the barred owl, but doubted the public would support it.

The concern voiced by many is that we are building management policy for federal forest around the recovery of a species that can’t be recovered.

There is no doubt that the pilot projects in Oregon are promising, but much deeper reform of our federal policies needs to be done.

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Posted in Federal Issues, Forest Fires, Logging Communities, Oregon, Pacific Northwest, Spotted Owl, Timber Industry

Turning back to our federal forests

January 7th, 2011

It’s frustrating – especially with a new and flawed spotted owl plan under consideration — to think about the failed dreams and wasted potential of our forestland. So many lives and communities have been ruined by onerous harvest limitations that don’t have any connection to science or reality.

Hal Salwasser, the dean of the College of Forestry at Oregon State University, understands this. In an extensive piece in the Oregonian, he describes how federal forest policy has created forests that are failing on all levels: suspectible to forest fires and beetles and also of no economic or social value.

Instead, he says, it’s time to reclaim the federal forests as a source of community wealth and health by making more timber available for logging. We can do it, he says, by returning to areas where trees were logged in the 1960s to 1980s, were replanted and have grown to suitable size. That can be done without screwing up the environment, without cutting old growth and without grinding intrusive new roads into roadless areas, he says.

Salwasser cites a U.S. Bureau of Land Management harvest project in southwestern Oregon as “a good experiment” in balancing harvesting with environmental stewardship.

Using federal forests for responsible harvest again will make the forests and their surrounding communities healthier.

In Salwasser’s view, Oregon has hundreds of thousands of federal acres that can be part of a sustainable timber supply. Another harvest of replanted trees would avoid cutting old growth, building new logging roads or violating stream setbacks and habitat protection rules added in the intervening years.

Forest productivity and mill efficiency have increased so it takes fewer trees to meet the international demand for wood products, says Salwasser, who has been dean for a decade at OSU.

“That frees up the rest of the forest to do something else,” such as provide wildlife habitat, carbon sequestration and water filtration.

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Posted in Federal Issues, Forest Fires, Logging Communities, Oregon, Pacific Northwest, Spotted Owl, Timber Industry

The shy and scared spotted owl

December 23rd, 2010

No one seems to be happy with the new draft spotted owl plan released by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. We have outlined why the plan is bad policy, and the federal government received innumerable comments from interested parties before the public comment period ended last week.

But it’s not just timber companies and timber communities that are criticizing the plan for its bad science and false assumptions. Several prominent environmental groups, including the American Ornithologists’ Union, Society for Conservation Biology, The Wildlife Society and the Geos Institute, reviewed the plan and say it’s full of holes as wide as old-growth timber.

“The Fish and Wildlife Service just doesn’t get it,” said Dominick DellaSala, chief scientist for the Geos Institute in Ashland.

Problem is — while these groups don’t like the plan or the science behind it — when you drill down to the details, they oppose the plan for the opposite reasons that timber companies and timber communities oppose it.

While timber interests want the federal plan to stay out of private forestland and not expand owl habitat, the environmental groups say the plan doesn’t protect enough habitat. While timber interests believe that smart and reasonable forest management, including thinning to protect from fire, will help protect the spotted owl, the environmental groups say thinning could hurt the owl.

What is clear is no one likes the spotted owl plan, and there is still a lot of work left to do.

Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB) did a story this week that demonstrates the complications that a spotted owl brings. And this involves just trying to find an owl in the wild.

The spotted owl, while being a political flash point for 20 years, is actually quite shy. OPB tagged along with University of Washington researchers who were attempting to record as many owls as they could in California’s Trinity National Forest.

It wasn’t easy. The owls don’t like to come out and play, and it’s so hard to find them that researchers have trained dogs to sniff out the pellets of rodent fur and bones on the ground that the owls have vomited up. Yes, this very important research sometimes comes down to owl vomit.

But the spotted owl has bigger issues. The main reason the owl population has declined in the last 20 years is because of the arrival of a bigger and more aggressive species: the barred owl. And the researchers say the owl sometimes doesn’t hoot because it’s worried about being attacked.

Lyle Lewis is with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in California. He says these days aggressive barred owls are showing up in the Trinity National Forest. And hooting can get a spotted owl into trouble.

Lyle Lewis: “In some cases barred owls may actually run them off. And even though its rare, there have been documented mortalities of spotted owls being killed by barred owls”

So the spotted owl has a new problem. If it hoots, it might get whacked by a bigger owl. If it stays quiet, it might not be counted by biologists and could lose its real estate to logging.

And while the researchers desperately try to find a dwindling and terrified population of spotted owls, the cost of protecting the owls keeps going up.

The state of Oregon alone spends about a million dollars a year tracking about 100 spotted owls that nest in state forests.

That’s about $10,000 per owl every year. And quieter owls could double that cost.

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Posted in California, Federal Issues, Pacific Northwest, Spotted Owl, Timber Industry

Delving into the impact of the spotted owl

December 17th, 2010

The same week that the public comment period ended on the new federal spotted owl plan, The News-Review in Roseburg, Ore., did a seven-part series on the impact of the listing of the spotted owl 20 years ago.

The series is illuminating, describing everything from death threats and lost jobs to how the city of Roseburg and Douglas County have tried to keep themselves going in recent years with new businesses and new ideas.

Unfortunately the News-Review this week just started a subscription-only model for its website, so the stories can’t be read in their entirety for free. But the series is well worth the $4.95 for a one-week subscription to the paper.

What is most striking about the series is the devastation that the spotted owl listing wrought on the timber-dependent community — and how fresh the wounds still are 20 years later.

Just take a look at some of the statistics reported by the paper:

Between 1988 and 1998, the number of lumber and plywood mills in Oregon declined by nearly half, from 252 to 127. Twenty mills closed in Douglas County alone, according to timber consultant Paul Ehinger of Eugene. Some 2,800 jobs in the wood-products industry in Douglas County vanished within two years of the owl being listed.

More than half of the 60,000 Oregon workers who held jobs in the wood-products industry at the beginning of the 1990s no longer had them by 1998, according to a report published in the Journal of Forestry in 2003.

By the end of the decade, nearly half of those who left the timber industry disappeared from state employment records. The missing workers were likely either retired, unemployed or living in another state.

Jim Geisinger, the (Douglas Timber Operators) executive director from 1976 to 1981 and now the executive vice president of Associated Oregon Loggers, said that in the early ’80s, the Umpqua National Forest sold 360 million board feet a year.

“Today, Umpqua National Forest is selling only about 10 percent of that,” he said.

A study by economists from the Portland-based consulting firm ECONorthwest, Oregon State University and the Oregon Employment Department tracked 18,000 former timber workers between 1990 and 1998 who found another job in Oregon. Nearly half found work in the service and retail sectors. One-third were employed in the manufacturing and construction industries.

The spotted owl listing impacted more than just job numbers — it affected lives. The bitterness was unleashed and received by both sides.

Probably the ugliest manifestation of the community’s anger came in the form of death threats to a variety of people.

Robert Heilman, a Myrtle Creek-based essayist and former laborer, said half-humorously the death threats seemed to follow a pattern.

“It struck me as odd at the time. Local environmentalists were getting (threatening) phone calls, and local timber people were getting letters from Lake Forest Park, Washington, and Garberville, California,” said Heilman, author of “Overstory Zero: Real Life in Timber Country.” “Timber people do hate by phone calls and environmental people by mail.”

Even after two decades, the bad feelings are still strong. Residents are understandably still reeling from the loss of their livelihoods, their traditions and their lifestyles. The environmentalists, meanwhile, are unapologetic, even though the spotted owl listing has done absolutely nothing to save the spotted owl.

Heilman finds it difficult to say what the community has learned at this juncture, 20 years after the turmoil generated by a shy, forest-dwelling bird.

“In the short run, there’s an awful lot of anger out there still,” he said. “I’m optimistic in the long run … but history tells me that fundamental change takes a long time.”

If you do buy a subscription, here are links to all the articles in the series.

Part I: Overview

Part II: Interviews with five people who lived through the listing

Part III: Profile of a logger who weathered the storm

Part IV: Environmentalists say original forest plan was undermined

Part V: Barred owl causes spotted owl population to decline

Part VI: Businesses diversify from timber

Part VII: The job market adjusts

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Posted in Federal Issues, Logging Communities, Oregon, Pacific Northwest, Spotted Owl, Timber Industry

Easing regulations in Washington

November 23rd, 2010

The Washington Forest Protection Association, the trade association for the state’s private forest owners, had its annual meeting last week, and the conversation veered from green building and the EPA biomass rule to development rights and conservation easements. But the buzzword was regulations, or rather, the desire for fewer regulations and a more predictable permitting process for forest landowners.

“We need to look at the regulatory web and look at how we can collapse it,” Jim Warjone, the chairman of Port Blakely Companies, told the crowd of 150 people.

“Predictability is critical,” he added.

The onus is on state lawmakers and officials to streamline the process, though this will be a difficult legislative session coming up in January. As in most other states, Washington faces a large budget deficit. Filling the $5.7 billion gap will mean making tough choices, according to Jay Manning, Gov. Christine Gregoire’s chief of staff.

Social services, corrections, higher education and health care for the poor will probably take the brunt of the impact, Manning said at the annual meeting. “We’ll be removing vast portions of these programs and it’s just sad.”

Rep. Brian Blake, D-Aberdeen, and a former logger, said it will be a “gut wrenching budget to write” but he would still like to see the state make permitting easier. “We’ve got to untie that knot,” he said.

David Nunes, the new president of the Washington Forest Protection Association, took the gavel at the end of the meeting. He said one goal should be to emulate British Columbia’s Wood First Initiative, which promotes the use of wood in the construction of public buildings, with an emphasis on wood harvested in B.C.

Washington’s state government should have a similar policy, Nunes said. “Why not Washington Timber First?”

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Posted in British Columbia, Pacific Northwest, Timber Industry, Washington, Washington Legislature

More time to have say on spotted owl plan

November 16th, 2010

As we wrote here and here, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is getting close to issuing a revised spotted owl plan and is taking public comment on the proposed plan. That 60-day comment period would have ended about now, but the feds just announced that the comment period is being extended another month, until Dec. 15th.

This is good news. The revised spotted owl plan has a lot of problems, as we outlined here, and more time will mean a few more weeks for the federal government to receive feedback and to reconsider some of the more onerous portions of the plan.

While the timber industry and members of Congress from Oregon and Washington asked for the extension, it appears that even conservation groups wanted more time, according to the Associated Press.

The timber industry and members of Congress asked for an even longer extension. They said the draft proposed significant changes to the 2008 plan, including a consideration for the first time of private lands in saving the owl from extinction.

“What’s the rush,” Tom Partin, president of the American Forest Resource Council, a timber industry group, said in a statement. “It’s as if they are trying to hide fatal flaws in the plan.”

The timber industry and conservation groups both said they wanted to see details about a system of habitat reserves that would be created to protect owl habitat.

“It’s unclear whether they will actually have reserves for the owl, or something similar to what was rejected previously by scientific peer review,” said Dominic DellaSala, president of the Geos Institute, a conservation group. “Right now we’re still waiting for what’s behind the curtain.”

Use the extended comment period to let the Obama administration know that the revised plan has serious problems. It’s critical that people who are concerned about the viability of working forests make their voices heard.

Here is where to submit comments:

Emailed comments can be sent to: NSORPComments@fws.gov. Written comments should be submitted to: Field Supervisor, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Oregon Fish and Wildlife Office, 2600 SE 98th Avenue, Ste. 100, Portland, OR 97266.

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Posted in Federal Issues, Logging Communities, Oregon, Pacific Northwest, Spotted Owl, Timber Industry

What is the EPA up to?

November 11th, 2010

This week the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency issued guidelines for how states should interpret its new rules for greenhouse gas emissions. Earlier this year those proposed new rules were announced and if passed, they would have killed the burgeoning biomass industry because they treated biomass plants just like coal and other fossil fuels.

The new guidelines released this week at least have promise. U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack is saying some nice things:

Secretary Vilsack said: “EPA’s release today of guidance to the states on greenhouse gas permitting takes a meaningful step forward in recognizing the potential role that energy from biomass can play in reducing greenhouse gas emissions.”

Under the EPA guidance, states can consider the use of biomass energy as a “best available control technology” for greenhouse gases.

The EPA is expected to issue more guidance to states in early January on biomass, and will decide whether more rulemaking is needed regarding biomass energy this spring.

Secretary Vilsack emphasized the benefits for rural economies in using wood, switchgrass or other agricultural products in biomass energy facilities.

He said: “Markets for woody biomass could also prove to be vitally important in allowing the US Forest Service and others to restore forests to mitigate the impacts of the bark beetle epidemic in the West and to reduce the potential for catastrophic fire in our forests.”

But what does all this really mean? The EPA’s proposed new rules would be onerous for the biomass industry, and it’s far too early to tell whether the guidelines released this week will make any difference.

Washington Lt. Gov. Brad Owen put it nicely in a recent op-ed in the Tacoma News Tribune. Owen came out against the EPA’s proposed rules and cited the widespread support for biomass among state lawmakers, Washington’s congressional delegation and Gov. Christine Gregoire. The Legislature this year also unanimously passed a bill that “encourages both a ready and ecologically sustainable supply of biomass from our state forests, a new source of revenue for our rural economies and a great mechanism to take better care of our forests.”

EPA standing in the way

October 20th, 2010

The Oregonian’s opinion pages have been burning up this year with compelling debate on working forests, federal and state timber policy and the future of the timber industry. This month is no different.

Earlier this month, the Oregonian editorial board wrote about the promise of biomass for the state’s economy and how it could all be threatened by a proposed Environmental Protection Agency rule change that would treat biomass just like coal and fossil fuels.

There remains great promise here for biomass energy.

Our forests need it — the pileup of woody debris is tinder for catastrophic fire, which threatens communities and leaves scars for decades. Our towns and cities need it — smaller biomass facilities, if distributed throughout the state, can provide jobs and help nurture economies while cutting the need for expensive hauling to a few large sites.

Moreover, our state needs it — biomass, correctly identified by Gov. Ted Kulongoski years ago as fitting within Oregon’s renewable portfolio standards, reduces fossil fuels reliance and helps to hold the line on emitting the greenhouse gas CO2.

But the federal rule change, called the “tailoring rule,” is a huge obstacle, the editorial said:

…(T)he EPA should snap out of its CO2 myopia by recognizing biomass as a renewable resource, which coal and fossil fuels are not. Regulating biomass facilities to the coal standard would shackle a fledgling industry with hobbling costs…

…If allowed to thrive and grow purposefully, “green” biomass enterprises will find new technologies for efficiencies and pollution control while at the same time putting Oregon’s forests and citizens to work. That’s above and beyond serving the larger goal of reducing our reliance on fossil fuels.

The editorial then spurred dueling op-eds in the Oregonian this week. Lisa Arkin with the Oregon Toxics Alliance argued not very convincingly that biomass is actually not the future of Oregon’s rural economy. She even cited the discredited Manomet study out of Massachusetts, which gives you a sense of her knowledge on the issue.

At the end of her op-ed, Arkin undermines the basis of her whole argument and acknowledges that biomass may indeed be the future of Oregon’s economy.

If we are to go down this path, Oregon residents must call upon our elected officials to require reasonable safeguards, starting with a complete state environmental impact report, carbon life-cycle accounting, and compliance with future, tighter Clean Air Act mandates.

In the other op-ed, Matt Donegan of Forest Capital Partners argued that President Obama — who visited Portland this week — should reverse the proposed E.P.A. tailoring rule.

First, it will promote job creation, particularly in rural areas. The energy sector is an emerging marketplace benefitting existing mills and the jobs associated with them. The potential to keep these mills operating by producing energy on site or providing biomass for new power facilities is one reason why Obama’s secretary of agriculture, Tom Vilsack, views biomass energy as vital to his rural revitalization goals.

Second, it’s necessary to keep Oregon on track to meet its Renewable Portfolio Standard targets of producing 25 percent of our energy — enough to power more than 1 million homes — from renewable sources by 2025. Unlike wind and solar, biomass provides energy 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Today, nearly half of Oregon’s renewable energy is derived from biomass.

Finally, it will maintain a sustainable use of our forests supported by forest businesses and the environmental community alike. Markets for biomass are fundamental to proposed ecosystem restoration on our federal lands, and they conserve the economic value of private lands, which help to preserve them as working forests as opposed to opening them up to development or other non-forest uses.

It’s time for the E.P.A. to reverse course. The timber industry is on the cusp of an exciting new technology that is both good for the environment and the economy, and the federal government is standing in the way.

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Posted in Biomass, Climate Change, Federal Issues, Logging Communities, Oregon, Pacific Northwest, Timber Industry

Leaning toward FSC in Canada

October 5th, 2010

There is more important news to come out of the Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI) annual conference in Vancouver, B.C., last month. Monte Paulson, from the Canadian website The Tyee, (who we just wrote about) did another piece out of the conference that sheds a lot of light on how forest certification factored into the historic Canadian boreal forest agreement that was announced last spring.

We wrote in May about how it was troubling that the agreement between timber companies and environmental groups ended up with the competing Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) as the certification standard for 173 million acres of boreal forest. Because of the vast acreage involved, it would appear that this could have an impact on the SFI-FSC debate in the U.S.

Monte Paulson’s story shows exactly how the boreal forest deal came together. And it’s interesting to see that forest certification was the major sticking point in the negotiations between timber companies and environmental groups. Finally, over beers, the two sides came up with the idea that they would agree to their own standards for managing the forest. But — and here’s the kicker — they agreed to use the FSC standard as a “reference point.”

Wayne Clogg, senior vice president at West Fraser Timber Company, explains what that means:

“Finally, and this one has been controversial, we agreed to use the FSC boreal standard as a reference point. Not as a starting point. Not as a benchmark. But as a reference point, so that environmental proponents could support the new standards by comparing these to the standards they were most comfortable with,” Clogg said.

“For us this truly is a win-win. We will incorporate this element into our SFI audits of the boreal, and retain all of the other positive benefits that we like about the SFI program,” he continued.

Clogg and his counterpart from the environmental groups were speaking at the SFI annual conference, so you can imagine that his remarks drew a mixed response, at best.

Here is how Clogg explained why his company reached the boreal forest agreement.

“The traditional model is: government sets up a table. Bruce comes in. He sits at one end. I sit at the other. We spend our time throwing tomatoes at each other. We walk out. We both give a different recommendation to government; they come out with something in the middle,” Clogg said. “And then we both dump all over them.”

A throaty chuckle gurgled across the ballroom of the Renaissance Hotel. The West Fraser executive continued.

“That’s the traditional model. What we’re trying to test here is: can these two sides get together, try and find that balance — it won’t be easy — bring some outside experts in and try and give a recommendation to government that we both support.”

So was the boreal agreement a foolish capitulation or a smart move?

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Posted in Canada, Green Building Standards, Pacific Northwest, Timber Industry

EPA rule has high stakes

September 19th, 2010

The Oregonian had a good story recently about how the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed changes in its greenhouse gas emissions rules could threaten the burgeoning biomass industry. The EPA’s “tailoring rule” is something we’ve written about several times before, and the Oregonian does a solid job of outlining why the stakes are so high.

Biomass, or using vegetation for fuel, has basked in a green glow in recent years, winning subsidies, bipartisan political support and a renewable energy designation in Oregon and nationwide that groups it with nonpolluting solar, wave and wind power. Oregon backers are hoping wood-fired power plants will spur thinning in the state’s abundant national forests, create thousands of rural jobs and provide a domestic source of fuel.

But the industry is in its infancy, supporters say, and new EPA rules could kill it.

“Biomass energy is economically marginal,” says Thomas McLain, head of wood science and engineering at Oregon State University and one of 100-plus forestry scientists who expressed concern about the proposed EPA rules in a July letter to Senate leaders. “Anything you do to (increase) the cost means it won’t happen. It will go away.”

The story also points out that 40 biomass plants already operate in Oregon, that the U.S. Department of Energy expects biomass plants to provide 14 percent of the the country’s electricity by 2030 and that politicians from both parties have come out in support of the EPA’s backing off its rule changes.

But the future of biomass is still far from certain, which is why supporters need to continue to be as vocal as possible.

In other news, the Oregonian recently also ran dueling opinion pieces on federal timber policy. In the first piece, Ben Shelton of the Cascade Policy Institute argues that the feds should allow local control of federal forests. A few days later, David Moskowitz of WaterWatch of Oregon writes that federal forest policy in Oregon is working.

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Posted in Federal Issues, Oregon, Pacific Northwest, Washington Legislature

Draft spotted owl plan released

September 11th, 2010

As we wrote last week, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was expected to release a revised spotted owl plan very soon, and just this week, it did.

One of the key points to make is the 181-page revised plan is a draft, and the government is taking comments for the next 60 days. Here is where you can send your comments:

Emailed comments can be sent to: NSORPComments@fws.gov. Written comments should be submitted to: Field Supervisor, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Oregon Fish and Wildlife Office, 2600 SE 98th Avenue, Ste. 100, Portland, OR 97266.

The reason the 60-day comment period is critical is there are some serious problems with the revised plan, and the Obama administration must hear from people who are concerned about the viability of working forests if the draft plan were to become final.

Here are just a small portion of the problems:

The plan itself is another example of an overreaching approach by the federal government.
New maps will come out in January 2011 with the final draft of the plan and redo all habitat reserves and incorporate private lands.
The federal government will redo the federal designation of critical habitat, which is now currently only designated on federal lands.

Take a look at the revised plan, as well as the additional information on the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service site. We will be providing more context on this important issue as it develops.

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Posted in California, Canada, Federal Issues, Oregon, Pacific Northwest, Spotted Owl, Timber Industry, Washington

Spotted owl: the next chapter

September 3rd, 2010

In June we wrote about the 20th anniversary of the spotted owl’s listing as threatened under the U.S. Endangered Species Act (see our posts here and here). The owl’s listing decimated the Northwest timber industry, and yet today, the spotted owl is actually worse off than it was 20 years ago.

What happened is a larger, more efficient species called the barred owl migrated to the Pacific Northwest from the East and is now squeezing out the spotted owl population. Both the timber industry and environmental groups agree the spotted owl is worse off, and apparently the barred owl’s arrival was a development no one anticipated.

And now, this week the spotted owl is back in the news again. A federal judge ruled that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service must redo its 2008 recovery plan for the spotted owl. But strangely, this redo is less about any failure to protect the spotted owl and more about what the judge said was influence peddling by a former deputy assistant Interior secretary, Julie MacDonald.

According to the Associated Press, the judge’s decision is the latest chapter in a series of lawsuits. The spotted owl’s listing in 1990 came after lawsuits from environmental groups, and then the 2008 spotted owl plan by the Bush administration was the result of a lawsuit from the timber industry. The judge’s decision this week was part of a lawsuit from environmental groups claiming that the Bush plan ignored the latest science and was the result of political interference from the administration.

So what does the timber industry think of this latest development in the 20-year saga over the spotted owl?

The Obama administration had asked the judge to revert back to the 1992 plan, which set aside a much larger habitat area for the owl. Instead the judge this week ruled that the 2008 habitat area set aside by the Bush administration would stand until a new plan can be written.

According to the AP, the timber industry is glad that the judge’s decision at least didn’t go too far.

Tom Partin, president of the American Forest Resource Council, a timber industry group, said a 2008 plan still left too much forest in critical habitat, but he was pleased that the judge left it in place until a revised designation is completed.

“It’s a lot better than going back to the 1992 critical habitat designation,” he said.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was apparently already expecting the judge’s ruling. The agency will release a revised spotted owl plan next week, and the plan should be finalized later this year.

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Posted in Federal Issues, Oregon, Pacific Northwest, Spotted Owl

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