Owl's Enemies Fight Back
The conservation campaigns to protect the endangered northern Spotted Owl have inspired many counter campaigns by timber industry lobbyists. These range from exploiting people's simple ignorance and fears to promoting carefully distorted "research".
The timber lobby, bent on blaming the Spotted Owl for every job loss including those caused by mechanization and over-cutting, has produced a huge array of posters, t-shirts, buttons and signs--some funny, some vulgar and some just plain stupid. See some of the best on the right.
B.C.-based anti-owl efforts include the silly proposal of Chilliwack forester Bernie Cross to save the owls by moving all of them into parks, along with millions of mice (as prey). Another is the "Spotted Owl Information Bulletin" published in December of 1995 by International Forest Products (Interfor). Interfor claims that its "landscape approach" to clearcutting (varying the shapes and sizes of clearcuts over the broad terrain) replaces the need to protect natural owl habitat. Interfor has also used computer modeling to suggest that, with or without habitat protection, the Spotted Owl has less than a 20 percent chance of survival.
The art of twisting statistics is raised to new heights in a recent book (Pacific Spirit: The Forest Reborn) by Patrick Moore, a former Greenpeace leader who sold out several years ago to become a high-priced lobbyists for the big timber barons. In his chapter on Spotted Owls, Moore features a rare study that says Spotted Owls can survive in a particular kind of California second growth. He fails to mention the hundreds of other studies which show that these owls cannot survive without oldgrowth forests.
Another of Moore's distortions is blaming the Spotted Owl for the "economic disaster" predicted for Washington and Oregon States when the U.S. government protected several million hectares of forest as Spotted Owl reserves. The fact is, overcutting already had closed down many mills there and the rest would have soon run out of oldgrowth...the same that is happening in much of B.C., leading to a loss in old-style logging jobs wherever it happens.
Instead of disaster, the Northwest States' economies rebounded with the value-added manufacturing and diverisfication of their economic base. In 1994, just three years after the timber lobby's owl howls had echoed world-wide, Oregon's unemployment rate fell to its lowest level since 1979, despite an influx of 40,000 people. While 15,000 jobs were lost in the woods and mills (not the 100,000 predicted), 100,000 new jobs were created, 20,000 in high tech companies. Nine out of every ten retrained forest workers found jobs, averaging only $1 less per hour than those in the woods and mills.
