Response to Oregonian's Op-Ed

By: Jim Petersen

An editorial published earlier this spring in the Oregonian, Oregon's largest daily newspaper, opines that it is okay for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to shoot predatory bard owls that have been busy killing off the region's threatened northern spotted owl population for at least a decade and probably longer. (This, long after the owl killed off the region's once thriving lumber industry).

The editorial is worth reading (click here) if only because it acknowledges the "emerging consensus" that "not only is there a role for commercial logging and thinning in public forests, there's an absolute need for it." It's about time the Oregonian's chattering class publicly admitted what most in the scientific community have been saying for years.

To balance things out, the same edition of Advocates For Certainty carries a loopy hand-wringer co-authored by Dominick DellaSala, chief scientist and president of Ashland, Oregon's Geos Institute and Randi Spivak, the institute's vice president for government affairs. DellaSala and Spivak fret over the Obama Administration's new forest planning rule. We don't know Spivak, but DellaSala is not among those who will never acknowledge the role forestry can play in, well, forests.

DellaSala et al thus fear monger the Obama recommendation that local forest managers have some say in developing plans for protecting fish and wildlife habitat and municipal watersheds. Never minds that the government's infamous forest planning rules are such a bureaucratic nightmare that they have made it impossible for the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management to protect at risk forests from catastrophic wildfire, insects and diseases.

Jim Petersen is a co-founder of the non-profit Evergreen Foundation, and publisher of Evergreen, the Foundation’s periodic journal. The Foundation was established in 1986 to help advance public understanding and support for science based forestry and forest policy. Jim is a member of the Society of American Foresters, the Forest History Society, the Intermountain Logging Conference and the Pacific Logging Congress [President, 2007].