Spotted owl

The timber industry has been rightly criticized for decades for its clearing and cutting of old growth forests.

And the industry has been in a polarized setup with the environmental community, with the timber wars in the 1980s and the 1990s, and the invoking of the Endangered Species Act by environmentalists to limit habitat destruction of the very habitat-specific northern spotted owl, which inhabits northern California, Oregon, and Washington.

And then there's the California spotted owl, which is mainly in the Sierra, which is not listed as threatened or endangered.

And The timber industry has its fingerprints all over the U.S.

Fish and Wildlife Service's barred owl management strategy.

It has not a 5% or a 3% chance of succeeding.

It is a 0% chance of succeeding.

The control area stretches from north of Los Angeles all up through California and the range of the California Spotted Owl and then further north to the northern Spotted Owl, up through the Cascades and the Coast Range in Oregon, up through Washington to Whatcom County to the border with British Columbia.

And the middle class was struggling harder all the way.

And you just don't have time to debate over, like, Spotted Owl policy anymore.

if you're really worried about paying for that tank of gas.

Yeah.

And then the roadless rule thing that you spent so much time, y'all are champions, you are heroes to me over the coverage of the roadless rule.

Thank you.

And I found out that many people commenting have it confused with the Northwest Forest Plan and the spotted owl stuff.

Yeah.

The county is 73% national forest, which pays nothing.

And the timber money that used to make up for it dried up when the Spotted Owl and the courts shut down federal logging in the 90s.

So that's pretty much it.

There's no tax dollars to fix any of these roads.

Olympic National Forest in about, I want to say, 92, 89, 92, somewhere in that range, was cutting about 350 million board feet.

Within five years after Spotted Owl and those decisions, it had fallen to 10 million board feet.

So they had no revenue to deal with roads.

And there was no plan to shut many of these roads because they were just equipment specific.

They tend to live in mature forests instead of You spend enough time in the woods and you totally understand there's a massive difference between a forest that's been around for 50 to 10,000 years versus a forest that's been around since they clear cut and put in a 7-Eleven, you know.

And the spotted owl like living in there.

And so in 1991— a federal judge blocked a whole bunch of timber sales in the Pacific Northwest in order to protect the northern spotted owl.

And this was one of the main tools by which people defended forests.

But even then, sometimes post-fire areas were logged, right? Like if a fire comes through and burns an area, You shouldn't log after a fire, right? Like fire ecology is actually a really important part of the Pacific Northwest ecosystem.

So they never found who did this, but they did.

They were able to... prove that it was started on purpose.

So people, although nobody knows the motive, people have thought that it could have had something to do with the Spotted Owl injunctions, or there's this concept called light it and log it, that if a place is protected, but then it burns, then it can be open to logging.