Spotted Owl Fever (A Political Disease)

Lois M. Scheel

1990

Published in:

Section 3 Newsletter September 1990, No. 85
The Northwest Technocrat, 1st quarter 1991, No. 322

In his bid for election, George Bush promised us that he would be our environmental president. (He also promised us that he wouldn't raise taxes.) So in the case of the old-growth/Spotted Owl controversy, we see our environmental president making decisions that are as unreliable as his promises.

He chose to ignore the facts when he came after the Northern Spotted Owl and its habitat. If our president had done his homework -- if he ever does any homework --, he would realize that the Spotted Owl is not the issue here. The issue is jobs over extinction. Humankind over extinction. If our president and those worried over losing timber sales and those worried over losing their jobs have their way, in ten years time the Spotted Owl will be gone, the old-growth timber will be gone and so will the jobs. So what would be gained?

Jack Ward Thomas, chief wildlife research biologist for the U.S. Forest Service's Northwest Forest Range and Experiment Station in La Grande, Oregon, is the highest-ranked wildlife research biologist in the National Forest System. His committee of 16 included 13 other biologists, among them most of the world's known experts on the Northern Spotted Owl. Thomas led this team of scientists after being asked by F. Dale Robertson, chief of the Forest Service and a former supervisor of Oregon National Forests where spotted owls live, to lead the research team and take the issue "wherever the science leads you."

The Thomas strategy calls for dispersal zones between habitat conservation areas, the "50-11-40 rule." That "rule" states that 50 percent of the forest outside the habitat areas should be made up of trees with a diameter of 11 inches and 40 percent closed canopy. This would close millions of acres of Northwest forests to logging.

In his April 10, 1990 journal entry, Jack Ward Thomas said: "We are at a building watershed period in the history of conservation in North America. It seems so strange that a small, cryptic owl should be a trigger and symbol to such a struggle. Our little group of scientists will be the center of the storm -- lightening rods for controversy.... Where had the six months gone? Six months in which I had been home only seven days.... Then came the chilling realization that now the consequences of our actions would descend upon us and follow us all the rest of our days. We had done our job and done it well. Yet, what we had done signified the end of an era, and with the end of that era would come economic dislocation and human suffering. We were not responsible for that.... but we will take the blame."

Like other scientists before him, who dared to point out the truth, Thomas has already lost friends, people who wouldn't shake his hand when he returned to church in La Grande after being gone for six months on this extensive research. Also, Thomas led the media into believing that he and his wife had no children, "anticipating the first wave of public hatred and animosity and wanting to spare them as much unpleasantness as possible." And the Federal Bureau of Investigation has been looking into a variety of vague personal threats. But whatever former friends believe, whatever happens to him personally, it won't, as Thomas points out, "change the science" of the situation.

Bill Munroe, an outdoors writer in the Portland Oregonian sports department, writes: "While it has come to be called the Jack Ward Thomas report, it isn't Thomas threatening to take jobs away, wreck homes and crush the timber-based economy of an entire region. Thomas is yoked by unforgiving science to the bureaucratic and political processes that may cause those traumatic social disasters predicted by politicians, corporations and the people it will affect. His background uniformly leads him to deal in data, facts and the unrelenting surety that what science says will be -- ultimately is."

"Protecting old-growth timber to save the Spotted Owl isn't the only obstacle in the way of logging jobs. Wilbur Wood, writing about natural resources for THE NATION magazine, says: "Should we sacrifice even these slow-to-regenerate forests of the Northern Rockies for the sake of jobs? The timber industry says yes, but when you consider how automated logging and milling have become these days, the jobs argument breaks down. Giant timber companies like Champion and Plum Creek, Georgia Pacific and Weyerhaeuser, have moved well beyond ax and saw, well beyond horses pulling logs down a mountain. Now they have robot-like machines that grasp and slice off trees like stalks of corn, along with huge mechanical grapplers and loaders. Now, as well as big tractors that knock down trees and tear up the ground, timber companies deploy gigantic 'yarders,' which squat on ridgetops and send tentacles of steel down forested slopes; these steel cables, pulled slowly over the land, drag down everything in their path.

"Logging is still hard and dangerous work, but instead of hundreds of human beings working over one mountain slope -- and at least potentially able to select which trees to cut and which to save -- we have a few dozen people pushing buttons, hitching chains, marking butt ends to indicate whether the logs are from private or public land. The more automated the logging, the fewer the jobs and the more devastated the land: denuded soils, streams silting up, trashed fisheries, piles of 'slash' (discarded limbs and branches, bushes and small trees) later to be torched, fewer living green things to take in carbon dioxide and breathe out oxygen, more and more ugliness..." (Mr. Wood seems to blame the machines for creating environmental degradation and not the misuse of machines. There is a vast difference.)

In some areas of Oregon and Washington, helicopters lift the logs out of mountainous forests, upsetting some modern-day Luddites. Several years ago one of them punched out a National Geographic writer who was commissioned to get the facts regarding the logging industry in the Olympic National Forest near Port Angeles, Washington, for daring to bring up this controversial subject. "How do you feel about the helicopters?" asked the writer. POW! Clearly the logging truck driver felt threatened by advancing technology.

In the case of the Spotted Owl versus old-growth trees, the loggers and timber companies feel threatened by scientific solutions in balancing nature. A farmer's billboard in Chehalis, Washington reads: "Support our loggers' right to keep their jobs; eat a Spotted Owl for lunch." A restaurant just south of there sells soup cans that intimate "Campbell's Cream of Spotted Owl Soup." Some lumber company employees are saying that the only good tree is a stump. And you can be sure that every time that cute little fluffy owl is shown on TV, innocently blinking its eyes, the hackles on loggers' necks rise up and dance a jig.

Politicians try to straddle the political fence so as not to offend either industry or environmentalists, anything to save votes. Virtually ignored in all this controversy is the Jack Ward Thomas factual report as environmentalists and politicians go out on a limb to find a way to save the Spotted Owl, log some patches of timber but save some and also save jobs, and our environmental president is shimmying up the same tree.

Over 50 years ago another man of science was vilified for daring to point out the truth. The importance of the energy factor in social measurement was made by this scientist whose laboratory was a Continent. Howard Scott and the team he led discovered that power machinery had become sufficiently efficient to produce more goods with less manpower and that we had reached the paradoxical situation where the more we could produce, the less we could consume. So, if the sale of human hours could not provide sufficient purchasing power to buy lifes's necessities, it became evident that some other distributing method must be devised.

Technocracy's founder and his team, first known as the Technical Alliance, devised an energy accounting design that would use measurement instead of money (which is a measure of nothing) as a means to provide an equal distribution of goods and services to North American citizens as their birthright. And since machines can do the work and do it better and faster, why do we continue to think we need a full-time job? Work, even in 1929, could be divided up among all citizens with four-hour-days, four-day-weeks, 167 days vacation a year and early retirement. Perhaps in time those wonderful machines could cut the work time to two hours a day. What is wrong with that? For the first time we would have time to better ourselves by improving our creative skills. But evidence seems to indicate that most people would rather go to their graves, living in the past, than embrace a new idea that just might let them learn how to live free and unencumbered by all the problems money creates.

It is interesting to note that Jack Ward Thomas was born two years after Technocracy Inc. was incorporated under the laws of the state of New York. Although he has done a commendable job of research regarding the Spotted Owl/old-growth timber controversy, and although he laments being blamed for causing job dislocation, he has not, nor have any of his fellow scientists, touched on the concept of measurement in job and economic areas. If measurement will work in conserving our valuable resources, why won't it work in other areas as well?

It is a sad commentary on the intelligence and initiative of the North American people that Technocracy's Energy Accounting design has been ready for implementation since 1933, yet our legislators, our technologists, and all the rest are still wondering what to do with our unemployed.