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In the Feb 2006 issue of Outdoor Life the editor relates the sad fact that the environmentalists had it all wrong about the Spotted Owl. Sad, that is for the 130,000 people who lost their jobs!
Having been placed on the endangered list in 1990, the Clinton administration (in the mid 90's), banned all logging on 24 million acres in the Pacific North West. This shut down the logging industry and therefore the loss of jobs.
The population of the Spotted Owl has continued to decline even though there has been no logging. Seems as though the reason is the fact that the Barred Owl's favorite target is the Spotted Owl! Heavens me! Did we jump to conclusions back in 1995?
Just another example of how the left, the environmentalists in this case, are really anti-capitalist when it comes right down to it.
2 comments:
True in many cases. But more nefarious is the bird people keeping mum on the fact that barred owls and spotted owls hybridize (aka viable offspring), which suggests they're the same species anyway. It's not like people think that humans that look different from one another belong to different species.
On the other hand, the barred owl is said to be less picky about living where there's logging, so the intra- or interspecies competition (depending on your taxonomic leanings) could be a warning sign that the logging was stopped too late, not too early, and maybe when the forest gets old enough - and we're all long since dead - a balance will be reached.
I think this all stands as an example of how people on the left and right tend to overlook the more complex but accurate explanations when the simple but inaccurate ones suit their agendas.
when forests get old enough and we're all long since dead ...
The spotted owl became a much needed poster child for the remaining old growth forests. The clean water these forests provide us alone will soon be worth more than their value at the mill.
To gut a resource that matures on a 500-1000 year cycle to save 130,000 jobs that would have been lost in 10 years anyway (at 1980s depletion rates), sounds pretty anti-capitalistic to me.
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