00:00The Endangered Species Act of 1973 protects plant and animal species that are threatened or endangered.
00:08It currently protects 1,600 plant and animal species and millions of acres.
00:13In 1990, environmentalists successfully lobbied to add the northern spotted owl to the list,
00:19a small bird that made its home exclusively in old-growth forests.
00:23If they couldn't force the government to protect the trees on their own,
00:27it was reasoned that by protecting the owl,
00:29the old-growth trees they lived in would also be saved.
00:34Well, my husband and I had a timber-falling business when they decided to list a northern spotted owl.
00:41And when that happened, the changes in the laws were coming really, really fast.
00:47I was like, how can this happen?
00:49You know, one day you're in business and the next day you're not.
00:54It wasn't about owls versus loggers. It was more than that.
00:58It was about communities struggling to survive.
01:03In the 80s, the amount of logs being sawn was in the order of about 6.6 billion board feet.
01:09By the time in 1998 rolled around, we were down to 2.2 billion feet.
01:15And largely because of the restrictions around the owl.
01:20The environmentalists had won.
01:22However, their victory would prove to come at a considerable cost.
01:28Unforeseen consequences often take time to reveal themselves.
01:33The problem with using the northern spotted owl is it didn't do the owl any favors.
01:39Because we equated the success in stabilizing and increasing owl populations
01:46with simply protecting old-growth forests.
01:50We ignored the other problems with the owl's survival.
01:54The encroachment into their range by the barred owl.
01:58That's more than happy to either eat with or mate spotted owls.
02:03So we kind of ignored that until it was obvious that that was a major factor.
02:08And now the Fish and Wildlife Service is relegated to going out and shooting barred owls.
02:13Which is not a very popular policy in some quarters.
02:18While restrictions slowed logging, it also slowed beneficial forest management.
02:23Without loggers, there was no one to clear overgrown forests.
02:27Or to treat areas that were increasingly beginning to look like fire dangers.
02:31And even if there had been foresters available,
02:34laws like the Endangered Species Act may have prevented the work.
02:39By 1990, they were saying, listen, we don't want to do any management.
02:44And so we could see even then that we were headed on a disastrous course
02:50that was going to have impacts for hundreds of years, if not thousands of years.
02:57There's so many ironies in this.
02:59I'm really concerned that the entire focus on spotted owl and research was misplaced.
03:05But again, these issues are completely out of the realm of public understanding today.
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