Forest dis-service
Suit says Feds failed to protect fast-fading California spotted owl
A. Clay Thompson / sfbg.com 8nov00
For the past decade the U.S. Forest Service has held countless hearings and issued dozens of studies on the fate of the California spotted owl, a rapidly disappearing raptor found mostly in the national forests of the Sierras. While bureaucrats fret in conference rooms, the brown-and-white bird of prey is vanishing – its population plummeting 7 to 10 percent a year.
Logging, road building, and development are destroying the old-growth woodlands the bird calls home. And if the owl's population decline continues apace, "it will pretty much be extinct in the next 15 years," said Rachel Fazio, staff attorney for the Pasadena-based John Muir Project.
So Fazio and the Muir Project are suing the Forest Service for failing to protect the owl, a cousin to the much discussed northern spotted owl, which is on the federal government's endangered species list.
Last week, adding to a lawsuit filed in October, Muir Project attorneys lobbed a legal atom bomb in federal court, asking for a temporary ban on all commercial logging in the Sierra region's 10 federal forests. The moratorium would send shock waves through the timber industry, which annually cuts some 200 million board-feet (about 200,000 100-foot-tall trees) in California's national forests, primarily in the northern Sierras. The case is slated to be heard in U.S. District Court in Sacramento in late November.
"They have a duty to ensure the viability of the species, and year after year we keep getting more and more species that inhabit national forests listed as endangered," Fazio said.
The California spotted owl could be on that list by next summer: there are only about 2,000 of them left. The medium-size raptor nests primarily in large-diameter trees, hunts for flying squirrels and other birds, and is thought by biologists to be intelligent and curious.
But even as the Forest Service classifies the bird as a "sensitive" species in need of special protection, the agency is allowing loggers to cut in spotted owl territory – which the Muir Project claims is a violation of federal laws.
At the heart of the dispute are "interim guidelines" for the bird drawn up by the Forest Service in 1993 – after studies showed the owl was in trouble – and still in place today. At the time, the agency insisted that the rules, which have allowed for commercial timber cutting on more than 300,000 acres, would be in place for only two years – while permanent rules were drafted – and would have "no significant impact" on the feathered creature.
Seven years later there are still no permanent rules, and the Muir Project argues that the Forest Service legally must suspend logging until it comes up with long-term regulations.
The Muir Project's best ammunition comes from the Forest Service itself: three of the agency's own studies show that over the last decade, under the interim guidelines, the owl population has declined at a disastrous rate of 7 to 10 percent annually.
Forest Service spokesperson Dave Reider told the Bay Guardian he couldn't comment on pending litigation or the issues raised by it. The agency is expected to announce long-awaited – and tentative – protections for the species in December.
The suit also names another victim of the timber industry: the Pacific fisher, a weasel-like, dark-furred creature that needs dense tree cover to survive.
"Anytime you build a road, anytime you clear-cut an area or significantly open up the canopy, you're essentially removing the fisher's habitat," said Noah Greenwald, a conservation biologist at Tuscon, Ariz.'s Center for Biological Diversity. "The more habitat you remove, the less able it is to survive. According to fairly extensive surveys, it's been virtually eliminated from the central and northern Sierra Nevada."
The long, slender carnivore – a relative of the mink and the otter – can grow up to 47 inches and dens in the hollows and cavities of large, old tree trunks. Greenwald and the Center are seeking to get the fisher protected under the Endangered Species Act.
Not surprisingly, the timber industry is less than thrilled with the lawsuit. From an industry perspective, the problem isn't too much tree chopping; it's too little. Logging, by thinning out "overcrowded" woodlands and clearing "fuel" (i.e., trees), reduces the risk of apocalyptic Los Alamos-style wildfires, insisted Chris Nance, a spokesperson for the California Forestry Association. "The single greatest threat facing these forests is catastrophic wildfire," Nance said. The proposed ban "makes absolutely no sense when you're looking at what's best for the forest and the animals and wildlife that inhabit these forests."
Bogus, Chad Hanson of the Muir Project retorts. "That's just a flat-out lie," he said, pointing to a raft of studies faulting an excess of underbrush – shrubs, saplings, and small trees – for uncontrollable forest blazes. "That's where the fire risk is coming from. It has nothing to do with mature trees; it's material that has no commercial value."
The real issue, Hanson argues, is the fate of animals like the California spotted owl. "They're on a trend towards extinction, and there's no question about that; even the Forest Service agrees.... in the very near future they'll be extirpated from large portions of their range – unless we stop logging."
E-mail A. Clay Thompson at ac_thompson@sfbg.com.
