Razing the Forest Primeval
The spotted owl and Oregon's old-growth timber face a common enemy: environmentally-callused pillagers.
Earth Diary
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By Tom Turner
The Pacific Northwest always seems to have noisy
environmental disputes under way—in state
legislatures, in the newspapers, in the courts, in better
saloons and taverns everywhere. A perennial topic is
forestry, and mid-1988 is no exception.
Much of the region has been heavily logged, to the point
that a flight over western Oregon, for example, reveals a
landscape that looks the way I did when, at the age of six,
my best friend offered to give me a free haircut. Large
patches have been skinned to reveal lumpy ground, devoid of
most everything but a few weeds. Regeneration of the trees
is painfully slow.
Environmentalists have struggled long and hard to find a
way to slow the clear-cut express. They have succeeded in
helping establish four national parks and several
wilderness areas in the 19 national forests in Oregon and
Washington. Still, the felling of
forests—particularly the valuable old-growth forests
where a single tree can provide $2,000 worth of
lumber—continues apace, even though perhaps only 10%
of the region's original stock of old growth remains.
In recent years, a new player has emerged on the field of
debate, the northern spotted owl, considered by biologists
a reliable indicator of the health of old-growth forests in
general. The owl requires old-growth forests to survive,
for reasons that are not terribly well understood. What is
well understood is that as the forests have been leveled,
the population of spotted owls has crashed—to the
point where it is threatened with extinction, in the
considered opinion of every expert in the field.
Despite this fact, pleas to add the owl to the list of
threatened and endangered species have fallen on deaf ears,
undoubtedly because of the economic and political power of
the timber industry in the region. Having nowhere else to
turn, conservation groups have recently turned, once again,
to the courts.
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