Scientists reject owl plan: The Bush administration plan flunks peer review

Register-Guard editorial about scientific flaws in draft recovery plan for the Northern spotted owl.

The Bush administration's efforts to reduce protections for the Northern spotted owl in order to bring back widespread clear-cut logging in Western Oregon's old growth forests have been dealt a well deserved reversal.

The administration proposes lifting restrictions on logging in 23 percent of the land now designated as critical habitat for the owl, citing research indicating that spotted owls do not necessarily require vast tracts of old growth habitat, The proposal also is based on the premise that the invasion of the barred owl represents a more significant threat to spotted owls than the loss of habitat.

So far, scientists aren't impressed. Two highly regarded scientific organizations hired by the administration to review the plan have concluded that the government failed to consider the best available science, a cornerstone requirement of the Endangered Species Act, before making room for increased logging in old growth forests.

The proposed recovery plan lies at the heart of the administration's push to increase logging on federal Bureau of Land Management lands and to restore timber revenue to rural counties throughout the Northwest. It's also part of an ongoing push by the administration to roll back habitat protections, while ramping up logging, oil and gas drilling, mining and other natural resource extraction activities on public lands throughout the West.

The groups that reviewed the plan, the Society for Conservation Biology and the American Ornithologists' Union, said there is a scientific consensus that the administration's plans not only would fail to bring back owl populations, but would result in downgrading the specie's status from threatened to endangered. In other words, it would send the owl flapping further down the flight path to extinction.

"The recovery team failed to make use of the best available science and, in fact, appears to have selectively cited from the available science to justify a reduction in habitat protection," the reviewers wrote. They added that the administration placed "far too much emphasis" on the threat posed by expansion of barred owl range into spotted owl habitat.

Lest anyone think these scientific organizations are out of touch with their peers, the plans also were reviewed independently by The Wildlife Society, a leading professional organization of wildlife biologists. The society declared that the recovery plan is fundamentally flawed - so severely that it should be jettisoned and an entirely new one developed.

"We are drawn to the conclusion that (the recovery plan) will not achieve the basic interest of spotted owl conservation," the society pointedly noted. "We come to this conclusion because the spotted owl is one of the most studied species ever listed under the Endangered Species Act, yet there is no reliance on this plan on the breadth and depth of the information available to create a scientifically credible plan."

It's a familiar theme for an administration that has never shown the slightest hesitation to politicize scientific decisions, whether they involve mercury emissions from power plants, salmon survival in the Klamath Basin - or the future of Oregon's remaining old growth forests.

There is a compelling need to increase logging on the 2.5 million acres of public forests in Western Oregon. Frustratingly, the BLM and Forest Service have been unable to meet timber production targets under the Northwest Forest Plan.

The plan, created in 1994 to settle a lawsuit brought by environmental groups, revised U.S. Forest Service and BLM management plans to scale back logging by more than 80 percent in order to protect habitat for spotted owls and other species. Under terms of a settlement with the timber industry and counties three years ago, the federal government agreed to review its designation of critical habitat and to increase timber harvests.

But those goals can be accomplished without putting the spotted owl at heightened risk of extinction and without bringing back clear-cut logging in old growth forests.

The Bush administration should scrap its fatally flawed spotted owl recovery plan and create a new one that can pass the science sniff test.