Science vs. forest plan

Saturday, July 11, 2009 | 2:06 a.m.

A biology journal has published a study that refutes the notion that logging needs to be expanded in the old-growth forests of the Northwest to protect them from an increasing threat of wildfires.

This notion was put forth in a forest-management plan proposed by the administration of former President George W. Bush. The plan was criticized by environmental groups as a sop to the logging industry, rather than a plan supported by scientific facts.

Old-growth forests in the Northwest are a critical habitat of the endangered northern spotted owls. Bush’s plan would have reduced the 6.9 million acres of protected spotted owl habitat in California, Washington and Oregon to 5.3 million acres. Most forestry experts argued that just the opposite — an expansion of habitat — was necessary for the owl to have any chance of surviving extinction.

In a federal court filing in April, according to the Associated Press, the Obama administration declined to support the Bush plan, stating that a federal inspector general’s report concluded that it had been politically manipulated.

Now, as mentioned earlier, a study of the Bush plan has been published in the journal Conservation Biology. The journal, published six times a year, is a publication of The Society of Conservation Biology, an international group based in Washington, D.C.

“The argument used to justify a massive increase in logging under the (spotted owl) recovery program was not based on sound science,” the study’s lead author, Chad Hanson, a fire and forest ecologist at the University of California, Davis, said.

Co-author Dominic DellaSala, chief scientist of the Oregon-based National Center for Conservation Science and Policy, a nonprofit organization, said forests are maturing into old growth suitable for owl habitat five to 14 times faster than they are being burned down by wildfires.

The Obama administration is negotiating with environmental groups that filed federal lawsuits over the Bush plan. A formal review of the plan is an almost certainty.

The possible extinction of any animal is a serious matter that requires genuine, peer-reviewed scientific studies, not quick-and-dirty plans motivated by special interests.