Northern Spotted Owl

The northern spotted owl (Strix occidentalis caurina) became the focal point of a singular struggle in the annals of North American environmentalism when it was listed as threatened under the U.S. Endangered Species Act (ESA) in June of 1990. The listing signified and drew widespread attention to the conversion of old-growth forests to younger, ecologically simpler forests, and to a brewing scientific and political controversy. This controversy raised questions about the legitimacy of industrial forestry and state forest policy dedicated to ecological conversion and simplification for the purposes of commodity production. Yet, it also threw into sharp relief the scientific, political, and cultural underpinnings of Western environmentalism. The fight over whether or not to save the owl should in these respects be seen as a crucial episode in the politics of biodiversity conservation, and as an important case study of environmental regulation in liberal capitalist societies.

The northern spotted owl is found primarily in the so-called Douglas-fir region, running west of the Cascade Mountains, and south from southern British Columbia, Canada into northern California. Until the mid-1970s, very little was known to science about the owl, yet early surveys suggested its nearly unique dependence on relatively large, contiguous areas of old-growth forest. A key reason the owls require this habitat is that they tend to nest in the broken tree tops and snags that form in mature stands (stands with a preponderance of trees 175–250 years old or more).

State-sponsored and independent biological research in the 1980s tended to confirm that the owl was highly dependent on old growth, and also that populations were declining in parallel with the loss of old-growth forests due to industrial logging. This science, together with the naming of the owl as an “indicator species” by the U.S. Forest Service in the mid-1980s, provided the basis on which a sustained campaign was mounted by a loose coalition of environmental groups aiming to reign in logging and thereby preserve remaining stands of old growth.

This campaign gained considerable momentum when the owl was listed as officially threatened in 1990, but also from key judicial decisions forcing changes in the management of extensive federal forest lands in the U.S. Pacific Northwest where most of the remaining old growth was and is located. In 1993, a Forest Summit was convened by then U.S. President Bill Clinton and Vice-President Al Gore to attempt to resolve the pervasive stalemate, widely if somewhat erroneously framed as a jobs versus environment issue. A resulting federal plan prescribed reductions in annual timber sale quantities in affected federal forests by approximately 75 percent, while at the same time embracing ecosystem management principles.

The economic and ecological implications of this episode are still unfolding, and the fight is by no means over. While Canada has no comparable federal endangered species legislation to the American ESA, the owl is considered in peril in southwestern British Columbia. More broadly, the fight over the spotted owl in the 1990s precipitated considerable soul searching in academic and policy circles about the approach to environmental regulation institutionalized by the ESA, and the cultural politics of nature that underpin it.

...