ASHEVILLE-NOV2021-WEB

Point of View
Biden Admin Largely Restores
Habitat for Threatened Owls,
Reversing Trump's Deep Cuts
By Olivia Rosane, EcoWatch
The imperiled northern spotted owl has won a
reprieve.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) moved last
week to reverse a Trump administration decision that
would have opened millions of acres of the owl's West
Coast forest habitat to potential logging, arguing that
Trump political appointees acted on inaccurate science.
"You can't remove over a third of an endangered
species' habitat and not expect it to go extinct," FWS
Oregon supervisor Paul Henson told The AP of the
Trump administration plan.
The northern spotted owl is a small, chocolate
brown bird that lives in the forests of Washington,
Oregon and northern California, The Guardian reported.
The bird is considered threatened under the Endangered
Species Act, and has already lost around 70 percent of
its habitat. In the past decades, the owl's population has
plummeted 77 percent in Washington, 68 percent in
Oregon and nearly 50 percent in California.
The bird's decline has led to conflicts between
environmental advocates and the logging industry, The
AP explained. In 2012, the federal government set aside
critical habitat to protect the species from extinction, but
this was blamed for a logging slowdown that harmed
rural communities.
Five days before President Donald Trump left office,
his administration pushed through a plan that would have
removed protections from 3.5 million acres, more than a
third of a total of 9.6 million acres of critical habitat. This
was even more than the logging industry had requested.
At the time, scientists protested that these cuts would put
the owls on the path to extinction, but Interior Secretary
David Bernhardt and former Fish and Wildlife Service
Director Aurelia Skipwith disregarded the warnings. Now,
the FWS has concluded that Trump appointees acted
with "insufficient rationale and justification" in shrinking
the habitat so drastically.
The new plan, finalized Tuesday, would exclude just
around 200,0000 acres of Bureau of Land Management
(BLM) land in Oregon.
"The exclusions we are proposing now will allow
fuels management and sustainable timber harvesting
to continue while supporting northern spotted owl
recovery," FWS principal deputy director Martha Williams
said in a statement when the new rule was first proposed
in July, as per The Guardian.
Wildfires are also a major threat to the owls. Blazes
destroyed 560 square miles of owl habitat last fall.
Environmental advocates applauded the reversal of
the steeper Trump cuts, but also disagreed with the
Biden administration's exclusions.
"We're glad the Biden administration repealed the
ridiculous and politically driven decision to strip 3 million
acres from the spotted owl's critical habitat. But 204,000
acres should not have been excluded from that
protection," Center for Biological Diversity (CBD)
endangered species director Noah Greenwald said in a
statement emailed to EcoWatch. "The spotted owl and
hundreds of other vulnerable species can't withstand the
loss of more old forest."
PAGE 4 • CRITTER MAGAZINE • NOVEMBER 2021