Zombie Environmental Management
By 
I have talked about this occasionally over the years, but it looks like there’s a solid chance the Forest Service is going to go ahead with the mass slaughter of barred owls to save the northern spotted owl in the Northwest. Understand a few things. First, it was the strategy of environmentalists to use the decline of the owl to stop the logging of the last old-growth stands in the 1980s and 1990s. Tying that strategy to a particular animal and the Endangered Species Act absolutely made strategic sense at the time. But that leads us to our second point, which is that the barred owl has migrated naturally to the Northwest, probably through Canada. There is not a great difference between the two species and they can interbreed. Also, the barred owls sometimes just kill the spotted owls. Simply put, they have evolutionary advantages. Third, there are basically no mills in the Northwest that can even process old growth timber at this point. That takes equipment that hasn’t been used in decades. Fourth, the hatred of environmentalists is still very strong in these dead timber communities and is the Northwest’s specific form of the culture wars. So there’s lots of people who want to see spotted owls die for the lulz. Fifth, because of the specificities of the law, the extinction of the spotted owl might in fact open up the forests for logging. Thus this utterly ridiculous way to manage the owls.
After a period of experimentation and debate, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, which oversees the Endangered Species Act, has concluded that it must protect spotted owls by permitting federal, state and tribal governmental agencies, private companies and individuals to shoot 470,900 barred owls over the next 30 years. The killings could begin soon.
Although the agency refers to barred owls as “invasive” on the West Coast — meaning they have moved into new territory where they are threatening native species — it isn’t even clear that barred owls are unnatural interlopers. Barred owls are thought to have migrated from the eastern United States through the Great Plains and southern Canada, eventually making their way to British Columbia and then on to Washington, Oregon and California. As this story goes, the barred owls’ arrival is a recent event.
However, there is genomic evidence that the barred owl has in fact resided in the Pacific Northwest for thousands of years. The genetic and phenotypic differences between western and eastern barred owl populations are too great to have occurred under the timeline in which the western barred owl is a new arrival. That evidence throws a wrench in the narrative that the barred owls are new arrivals, and so can be considered invasive, and yet that evidence is barely mentioned in the fish and wildlife agency’s most recent Environmental Impact Statement proposing the mass killings.
As more plants and animals move to novel habitats, these sorts of conflicts will occur increasingly often, and keeping things as they once were will require more and more intervention. Conservation prioritizes protecting species and ecosystems, but the harms to individual barred owls will be tremendous. Constant killing to keep ecosystems from changing in an already volatile world is a dystopian, rear-guard conservation strategy.
Many philosophers, conservation biologists and ecologists are skeptical of the idea that we should restore current environments to so-called historical base lines, as this plan tries to do. In North America, the preferred base line for conservation is usually just before the arrival of Europeans. (In Western forests, this is often pegged to 1850, when significant logging began.) But life has existed on Earth for 3.7 billion years. Any point we choose as the “correct” base line will either be arbitrary or in need of a strong defense.
The problem here is the problem with a lot of environmental-based law, especially, say, water law–which is that the law sets into stone something that is an ever-changing process. So when the conditions change, the law demands things return to the arbitrary baseline of what things were like at the creation of the law, whether that makes any sense at all.
This whole thing is, to be blunt, complete nonsense. But one can also see how the environmental agencies can end up in situations like this.