Remember the Spotted Owl? A few years ago it was the subject of
great alarm by the tree-worshipping community. They claimed it
could only survive in “old growth” forests; that it would go the
way of the dodo bird if logging weren’t stopped in such
forests.
At the time I was puzzled. A forested rural retreat on the
Northern California coast has been in my wife’s family for nearly
eight decades. For several years a family of Spotted Owls has
happily nested and billed-and-Who’d there, living a few hundred
yards from the house in distinctly second-growth Douglas fir
trees.
No matter, the tree-worshippers managed to get the Spotted Owl
added to the Endangered Species list. Following this the United
States Forest Service decreed the Northwest Forest Plan. Under its
terms millions of acres were set aside for the owl, thus cutting
timber sales — and ending thousands of jobs — in the Pacific
Northwest.
Old growth redwoods got special treatment from the
tree-worshippers. Conjuring visions of a planet devoid of redwood
trees, they clamored for protection of all remaining “old growth”
redwoods. Much negotiating ensued between their forces, the Forest
Service and the lumber companies. Protection of the nesting grounds
of the Marbled Murrelet was thrown in by the TWs as a bargaining
chip.
Their cause was helped, albeit unintentionally, by the other
side. Several years ago venerable Pacific Lumber Company, long
admired for its judicious and slow harvest of redwoods, was taken
over in a leveraged buyout by a Texas company, Maxxam. As a result,
Pacific was burdened by so much debt that its new owners greatly
accelerated the redwood harvest in order to generate cash. Maxxam’s
greed handed the tree-worshippers an issue. They said Maxxam proved
the need to immediately put aside all the “old growth” trees. They
won. Not only that, they began to clamor for buffer zones of trees
to surround the “old growth” ones. After that would come buffers
for the buffers and so on, until not a tree would be left anywhere
for logging.
Along the way, a monkey wrench was thrown into this well-oiled
campaign machinery. Carefully studying the nesting habits of the
Spotted Owl over several years, a team of scientists found that the
owls did very well in second-growth (that is, managed) forests
along the coast, although inland owls did need more old-growth
trees. The original claim by the tree worshippers had been based
entirely on the latter fact, as if it were universally true. The
one-size-fits-all approach prevailed.
Now the timber companies are asking the federal government to
play fair. A coalition of them has petitioned Interior Secretary
Gale Norton to require the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service to
conduct a review of the effects of the Spotted Owl program. The
coalition says the USF&WS was to have done this seven years
ago. (The USF&WS is the same agency that ordered counseling as
punishment for several of its “scientists” after they had slipped
fraudulent lynx fur samples into a study to determine if the lynx
should have a larger protected area.)
About the petition, the chairman of the American Forest Resource
Council, Bruce Taylor, Sr., said, “We just want the law to be
followed just like others want the law to be followed. It’s only
reasonable that it [the Spotted Owl matter] should be reviewed.”
Good luck, Mr. Taylor. The tree worshippers want the law to be
followed in one direction only: ending all logging everywhere.
The more radical tree worshippers have taken to driving spikes
into trees and pouring sugar into lumber company vehicle tanks to
sabotage legal logging practices (and maybe kill some lumberjacks
in the process). Two years ago, one dreamy young woman climbed high
into a redwood tree and lived there on a platform for months to
“save” it.
These massive efforts to use the Endangered Species Act and to
set aside larger and larger buffer zones of trees mask the
underlying motive of the so-called “environmental” movement, to
wit: stopping industrial society in its tracks.
If you have flown over the Pacific Northwest you have seen mile
upon mile of forests broken only occasionally by what looks like a
small patch of plowed ground. These patches mark sections in which
trees have been harvested (and almost always replanted). Up close
they are not pretty, but nearly all are far from highways and, in
any case, represent a resource going through part of the cycle of
harvest and renewal.
But to hear the tree worshippers tell it, cut one more tree and
there goes the neighborhood. The cut trees will build more houses,
encourage more suburban growth, sell more SUVs, guzzle more gas,
consume more fattening foods and so forth. You get the idea.
Those who call for reason to prevail, with “balance” between
no-logging and careful harvesting, are usually dismissed by the TWs
as wolves in sheep’s clothing. As for the tree worshippers, their
motto seems to be, “Mankind is but a passing disaster on this
planet.”
