Six years ago, the Clinton administration unveiled the Northwest Timber Plan, a landmark compromise intended to preserve both jobs for loggers and a fragile inhabitant of the trees they fell: the northern spotted owl.
The plan covered 24.4 million acres in the three Pacific Coast states, including six million acres in California's sparsely populated northern third. Today, according to a U.S. Forest Service report issued in April, the owl population -- now estimated at 8,000 pair -- is declining at 3.9% a year.
For the Forest Service and the timber industry, it's a clear sign that the federal plan is working: The rate of decline is lower than it was earlier in the decade.
But two environmental groups -- including the Pasadena-based John Muir Project and the Native Forest Council in Eugene, Ore. -- think the plan is failing. So much so that they have gone to Seattle federal district court, where they've asked Judge William Dwyer to issue a temporary injunction barring any further logging in the zone until more research is done into the owl's disappearance.
Why? While the owls' decline rate has gone down, it's still four times greater than the Clinton administration predicted it would be under the compact -- 1% a year.
"The plan is not working," says Tim Hermack, executive director of the Native Forest Council.
The timber industry is quick to argue otherwise. "We can't help but question the need for a moratorium when the statistics suggest otherwise," says Chris Nance, a spokesman for the California Forestry Association in Sacramento. A moratorium "would clearly have an impact on our profession as we know it."
The stakes certainly are high for the rugged -- and economically distressed -- region that the owl shares with loggers. While statewide unemployment in April averaged 5.5%, the timber-rich counties of Humboldt and Trinity, for example, had a combined jobless rate of 7.9%, according to the California Employment Development Department.
And, claims the Independent Forest Products Association, an industry group in Beaverton, Ore., residents of Humboldt and Trinity counties would lose $24 million in income if all logging on federal lands there were halted.
The Forest Service has not officially responded to the legal petition, and officials at the agency say they can't comment on pending litigation. But more broadly, they say, environmentalists are missing the good news: the report's conclusion that the threatened species is on a path toward recovery.
"What we see now is that the rate of decline is dropping," says Rex Holloway, a spokesman for the Forest Service's regional office in Portland, Ore. "We cannot expect overnight results. This is a long-term plan, and to make a difference, it is going to take some time."
Nevertheless, the owl's decline has been particularly pronounced in California. Wildlife experts don't have exact figures for the drop, but they suggest that differences between the owl's inland habitat in California and its coastal nesting areas in Oregon and Washington are to blame.
The "cold, wet springs of Northern California exacerbate the pressures logging puts on the bird," says Alan Franklin, who teaches wildlife population biology at Arcata's Humboldt State University and studied the California owls up close for the Forest Service.
Mr. Franklin is quick to add that the accelerating decline of California's spotted owl population is still unexplained and that the trend could disappear in three years.
But that doesn't satisfy the owl's defenders, whose stunning victory in Judge Dwyer's court eight years ago gave rise to the Northwest Timber Plan.
In 1991, the judge found that the Forest Service had failed to produce a plan to protect the northern spotted owl, which had been listed as threatened in 1990 under the Endangered Species Act. The owl lives in the top branches of mature fir trees; clear-cutting, the judge found, had destroyed 90% of the bird's habitat, leading to steep declines in the population.
Judge Dwyer enjoined all timber sales in the owl's region until the agency adopted a management plan as required by the National Environmental Policy Act. But the plan, issued in March 1992, failed to assuage environmentalists. They contended that the Forest Service had ignored a study by its own researchers showing that the owl population was declining by 7.5% a year. The judge continued the logging ban until further research was conducted.
The resulting reassessment led to the Northwest Forest Plan, which settled the lawsuits before Judge Dwyer. It covered the 24.4 million acres in the three states, and set aside some 10 million of them as spotted-owl habitat that could never be logged.
Of the total acreage, 30% was already off-limits to logging because it encompasses national parks, wilderness areas or scenic rivers. The result: Timber harvests on the federal land were reduced to 20% of their 1980s levels.
In their new motion, the John Muir Project and the Native Forest Council argue that Judge Dwyer should once again prohibit logging while the Forest Service conducts yet another spotted-owl evaluation, which the groups say is required because of the "significant new circumstances or information" contained in the agency's recent spotted-owl report.
Mr. Nance of the California Forestry Association says that the environmental movement may be missing the forest for the trees by focusing solely on the owl -- and not on the overall state of the far north's economy and ecology.
"We are one of the 10 largest employers in the state," says Mr. Nance. But "aside from jobs, the number one concern of ours is the state of our forests," he adds. "Three times more trees are dying than are being harvested in our national forests."
But Chad Hanson, executive director of the John Muir Project, has little sympathy for those who rely on the timber industry. "It's good for those people to get away from the boom and bust of logging."
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