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Today's Top News
Bush Bureaucrats Rewrote Owl Plan
The Bush administration recently proposed a "recovery" plan for the threatened northern spotted owl that could allow increased old-growth logging in the Pacific Northwest. If you wonder how cutting down the forests where the owl lives would help bring the owl back from the brink of extinction, look no further than the Bush administration's track record.
Administration officials have a documented history of manipulating science to serve special interests. The U.S Fish and Wildlife Service is publicly misrepresenting the process by which the draft recovery plan was developed, the scientific validity of the plan and the threats to the owl by continuing on the present course.
I served on the recovery team that submitted a draft recovery plan last September to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
A short time later, the team was notified that a secret "oversight committee" in Washington, D.C., had rejected the draft and directed us to change the plan substantially, de-emphasizing the well-documented connection between spotted owl survival and its old-growth forest habitat.
The oversight committee included Julie MacDonald, the deputy assistant Interior secretary who recently resigned after an Inspector General's investigation found she had altered scientific conclusions to accommodate the demands of special-interest lobbyists.
The administration's recently released draft northern spotted owl recovery plan bears little resemblance to the one crafted by the recovery team.
The team recommended a strategy based on protecting owl habitat in a network of old-growth forest reserves. This approach was first employed in the scientifically rigorous 1994 Northwest Forest Plan, which also recognizes that the forest values most demanded by the public -- clean water, healthy salmon and wildlife populations, open space, recreation and ancient forests -- need to be protected.
One of the most troubling changes is that the administration's plan could reduce old-growth habitat by as much as 25 percent. At the same time, spotted owl numbers are plummeting.
Although the influx of the barred owl, a competitive species, is contributing to this decline, so too is the legacy of old-growth forest logging. The science is clear: Because the owl is rapidly declining from multiple threats, it needs more habitat protected in fixed reserves, not less.
It's time for the Fish and Wildlife Service to scrap the draft recovery plan and start fresh.
Next time, the recovery team should include independent spotted owl scientists who can work in a process free from political wrangling.
Credible science, not political payback, needs to determine what comes next for the owl and the old-growth forests that hang in the balance.
Dominick A. DellaSala is chief scientist and executive director of the National Center for Conservation Science & Policy and serves on the Northern Spotted Owl Recovery Team. A public meeting on the recovery plan is at 6:30 p.m. today at the Oregon Convention Center.
© 2007 The Oregonian
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Show AllThe more trees we dispose of the faster we can despoil the planet the faster Christ will return, snap his almighty fingers and zap all the snide little liberals into hell. Booyah!
Like Julia Butterfly camped in one of those amazing redwoods, in those old growth forests I hear the choir of heaven sing. There is simply no place like them, they resound with the silence of pure sacred energy. Ancient beings whose cores have widened slowly as their life trajectories followed the growing madness of modern mankind, must they be sacrificed too? EVERY sacred thing is being sold as if nature were a fire sale. It's just unbelievable, especially now where places that ordinarily are bathed in rain and grow like gardens are becoming dry and sparse as the old dust bowl. What a cruel fate that those with no respect for life nor conscience for Creatiion's masterworks are placing every good living thing and being at risk. The rate of extinction of species is dizzying, the loss of the great beauties rendering of this globe a series of dead zones, mining craters, and geographies rendered toxic by the military and the poisons it leaves behind. This is what the patriotic fervor is for?
Write this book Siouxrose: "The Human Plague"
Ezeflyer: I have faith in mankind. I think 10% is truly independent in its thinking and that thought process sees the best in human potential. There is anoter 10% that sees and foments the worst, and the 80% in the middle, with truly liberal education and exposure to ideals and the ways and means of a just society could go either way. Centuries of dog-eat-dog, me-first, patriarchal might makes right conditioning, aided and abeted by economic systems that have been merciless in their harm (caste system, slavery, female servitude, debtor's prisons, etc)... we are a broken template; but what we could be--as the courageous souls who meet for the World Social Forum--is yet to be seen. Out of the ashes of this dying phase where every TRUE thing has been co-opted so that the natural world is the thing feared, and the manmade mercantlist one allotted false value (as the natural world dies) will come an eventual rebirth. ALL the masters who have come to earth have taught the same things, but people worship the individual and form teams, rather than follow (for the most part) the message. In my metaphysical view, the human soul has been imprisoned by false gods; but a higher call is possible, and may prove the ONLY lasting thing after the cycle of transition which we have begun. It is NOT an easy phase... probably all the tests each of us has faced up till this point has been prep work. End of an age phase that's lasted 2200 years... if the theory of reincarnation (I am a believer in this) holds true, imagine all the lifetimes you've lived? Writers like Gordon Michael Scallion, Ruth Montgomery and my favorite--H.L Chaloner, out of print classic, The Wheel of Rebirth, offer evidence (perhaps not of a species that would satisfy left brain minds; but as Richard Bach once stated, "If you argue FOR your limitations, you get to keep them.") that what we do in lifetimes, even as far back as hundreds of years ago, still meets us in the present. Many diseases are karmic... the one who took a life, or maimed another, may find they now carry a weakness in THAT portion of their body. Call me a romantic (LOL) I believe in this higher justice... I don't know how people can live with the moral squalor of our times believing that these horrific excuses for human beings can really get away with what they're doing. It's been shown that the torturer is also harmed by the act of destroying another human being. Imagine these "leaders" and the blood on their souls? It's not like they are operating for any ideals, this is just blind massacre... an all-out tribute to Mars, that's THEIR god. Call it what it is... it's ALL homage to the destroyer, the god of war. This has nothing to do with JESUS or MOSES or MOHAMMED or BUDDHA or any HIGH teacher/ambassador of Holy Spirit. The angels are crying... but those of us who hold the light, who never doubt that mankind is capable (intended!) for better than this, we are doing a good work.
PS: Kivals? Help me out here, would you... and no talk of Cheney eating blood for breakfast!
Several months ago, Zogby International, a noted polling firm in the US, had included a question for the general public that asked if they felt our government manipulated science to serve special interests. While I don't know the statistical outcome of the poll in regard to that question, this article certainly hits upon a very important concern that questions our current administration's bent on maneuvering data to suit their agenda. I'd be open to contact [see profile page] by anyone who may be aware of the poll's results regarding this question.
Now, I'm wondering if that question was born of this one isolated incident, or a practice that's taken root within the Bush administration.
My heartfelt appreciation goes to Dominick A. DellaSala and The Oregonian for their contribution to publishing their findings.
-Marc