High Country News Feature
Spotted Owls Get a New Plan
U.S. Fish and Wildlife call for more thinning of Southwestern forests to protect habitat. Will the logging industry try to make an end run around the owls?By Jodi Peterson, Guest Writer, 6-28-11
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| Photo of Mexican spotted owl, courtesy USFWS. | |
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The gigantic Wallow fire now searing Arizona and New Mexico has burned a lot of things, including several thousand acres of habitat for the threatened Mexican spotted owl (not to be confused with its more notorious cousin, the Northern spotted owl, once blamed for the demise of logging in the Northwest).
Now, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has released a new recovery plan for the raptor. It was federally listed in 1993 and in 2004, FWS designated 8.6 million acres of critical habitat in Arizona, Colorado, Utah and New Mexico.
Its population has continued to decline though, mostly due to habitat loss, despite court rulings upholding the critical habitat designation. But without good on-the-ground management, that designation doesn’t provide much protection from the biggest threat to the species: wildfire.
April Reese reports for Land Letter (subscription required):
“We recognize the primary threat to the owl is fire,” said Bill Block, manager of the Forest Service’s wildlife and terrestrial ecosystems program in Flagstaff, Ariz., who helped write the recovery plan. “We see a lot of the Southwest burning up right now, and we know we’ll be losing a lot of owl habitat. And we also know that if we do management, we can limit the amount of habitat we lose. So from our perspective, (making owl habitat more resistant to stand-replacing fires) is the primary way to reduce the threat to the owl.”
Decades of fire suppression have left Southwestern forests overloaded with small trees and underbrush, while drought and climate change have made huge, high-intensity fires the new norm for the region.
The new recovery plan emphasizes restoring Southwestern forests to improve habitat and reduce fire risk through expanded thinning projects, reports Land Letter. It also calls for monitoring of owl populations, although some environmental groups say the monitoring isn’t adequate to determine if the bird’s numbers are increasing or decreasing. They also point out that the plan does not address other factors, such as grazing.
On the flipside, others are angling to boost the Southwest’s timber economy by making an end run around the owl, despite the fact that logging in the region, like that in the Northwest in the ‘90s, has fallen victim to forces far greater than spotted owls. Changing markets, globalization, and the mechanization of tree-cutting, along with stronger environmental protections overall for forests, have had much more to do with the loss of logging jobs in both regions.
Nonetheless, New Mexico Rep. Steve Pearce (R), thinks that getting spotted owls out of the way will return his state’s timber industry to its former glory. He’s introduced a bill in the House (HR 1202) that would “restart jobs in the timber industry by providing for the protection of the Mexican spotted owl in sanctuaries.” Pearce’s bill would allow logging on millions of acres, while keeping owls tucked out of the way in 1,000- to 3,000-acre reserves.
Environmentalists say the bill, which exempts logging from environmental review, would green-light the cutting of vast areas of old-growth timber that the owls depend on – and the relatively small sanctuaries wouldn’t be enough to save them.
Jodi Person is the managing editor of High Country News. This item originally appeared on The Goat Blog and is republished here with permission.
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Comments
Up until two years ago the markets for wood were pretty decent, and given the understanding of fire behavior in relation to fuels, there's at least 15 years in which forestry operations COULD have ameliorated:
1. The gross fuel load left over from "suppression."
2. The water uptake issue from drought.
3. The water uptake issue from "climate change."
4. Contiguous, indefensible fuels that happen when no vegetation management (at least at the scale needed) takes place.
The sick fact is, the markets were there in order to make a pretty big dent in the Wallow precursor conditions, and not just in the burn area. But litigation over the owl and other whatnot species bankrupted and removed the forestry capability from the Southwest. And we -- or maybe Pearce's constituents, anyway -- reap the whirlwind.
Yes, it is their habitat, especially their nesting habitat, that is being incinerated. And yes, their babies are also being incinerated. Preservationists will claim that ANY plan to manage owl habitat will "green-light the cutting of vast areas of old-growth timber that the owls depend on...". They desperately want to imply that foresters want to "cut down the forests to save it from wildfire". They also want to convince the public that even the Forest Service Wildlife Biologists are in on the scheme to clearcut owl areas outside of "sanctuaries". Using eco-lies to push agendas is soooooo Republican. Does their eco-end justify their eco-means?
The Forest Service's response to the California Spotted Owl, a bird NOT on the ESA list, was to eliminate ALL clearcutting, as well as stopping the cutting of trees bigger than 30" in diameter. AND, the Forest Service did this without a court order, because it was the right thing to do. These restrictions have been in force since 1993!!
I believe that preservationists MIGHT allow minimal non-commercial management of submerchantable trees. They first want to exhaust all of the inadequate responses before allowing meaningful treatments to occur. We cannot continue to blame the distant past while blocking the future. Is it OK to let 10,000 old growth trees burn and die instead of thinning overstocked and unhealthy forests?
Those trees and those logs only have value when there is a product that can be made from them. And then you have to get the logs to where they are converted into a product. New Mexico and Arizona had---and had is the operative word here, referring to past tense and a former time, a developed mill and pulp capacity to use the surplus wood that fuels the fires. But no more. So logs are at this time valueless. And if you think banks and lenders will lend to construct a mill with only the USFS timber sale portfolio as the log supply, you best get back in the hogan and chew on some more peyote. It ain't gonna happen.
First, Canada has Federal and provincial governments that favor logging, milling, and selling "Crown" timber. So, the US is the prime market and they provide over 40% of American construction lumber. Only the US is so in the tank in home construction and sales, so Canada isn't doing much and the US less, in terms of making lumber.
The existing sawmills have a source of timber and logs. There is a financial fidelity to that land, its management, and growing and harvesting trees on that land. The USFS timber is, at this time, without markets. Private timber investments pay dividends only when the trees are cut, and cut they must be. So USFS timber does not have a role or markets, in the business sense.
There is no end to the Federal and State subsidy to energy production that does not use fossil, fissile, or fiber to produce energy. So you have wind and solar energy deals that cost way more than can be justified or implemented without vast government subsidy. Your tax dollars pay the difference between the cost of energy and what you pay for it. So, if you want to use timber from the USFS lands to create jobs, and products with a market, you will have to subsidize the hell out of a woods products venture. Government guaranteed loans. Cash up front. Because those mills cost a lot to build today, and to run. No wigwam burners, no muddy log yards, no pollution allowed and no noise and the list is endless. And because the infrastructure of sawmilling and pulp is long gone due to no customers, there will be expensive logistics to site and build a mill, and then keep it running with spare parts, and knowledgeable people to do the work. It won't happen.
You can't go back. When the timber was denied, the whole of the dominoes fell and there is no way to stand them up again. And because the whole of the Federal process is so tied up in legalities and process, the mill that was built on a thousand Federal and Congressional promises could find itself without logs.
I guess you just sit and watch the fires, and do whatever it is you need to do to prevent fire from consuming your property. This week it is Los Alamos and a nuclear reactor in harm's way from fire, and another nuclear facility under threat by water now running into it along the Missouri River system.
As far as owl habitat goes, the experts are in charge. The designated protectors are responsible for the owls, and if land management decisions result in owl habitat being lost in unimaginable amounts, the only place to put blame is on the USFS and their buddies in the NGOs of Green. You can't blame loggers or sawmill owners. You can only blame the USFS because they are the ultimate minders of the owl habitat. That the USFWS and others have their say, as well, is still people getting their paychecks from the same source: your taxes.
The "end run" around the law to log the last tree: go find someone who has the mill or the log markets for logs. They don't exist. There are none. There is nobody to make the end run. The timber industry is alive and well, existing on their own timber from their own timberland. And even then they can't sell all they can make. All that blathering from idjuts in the city is no more than another ignorant outburst from our fiercely un-educated youth class and the aging hippies who started this bullshit story a half century ago. The gift that keeps on giving.