bedfellows

The strange political bedfellows created by efforts to save spotted owls in the Pacific Northwest just got even stranger.

Already Republican members of Congress were allied with animal rights activists.
They don’t want trained shooters to kill up to 450,000 barred owls, which are outcompeting northern spotted owls, under a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service plan approved last year that would unfold over three decades.

Now, timber interests are aligning with environmentalists in favor of culling the owls.

Some logging advocates are afraid nixing the plan will slow down timber harvesting. Roughly 2.6 million acres of timberlands in western Oregon managed by the Bureau of Land Management are governed by resource management plans contingent on the barred owl cull going forward, according to Travis Joseph, president and chief executive of the American Forest Resource Council, a trade association representing mills, loggers, lumber buyers and other stakeholders in the region.

The area can produce at least 278 million board feet per year under current plans, “with the potential for significantly more,” Joseph said in a mid-October letter to Congress.

If the cull is scrapped, he said, the federal agency likely will need to restart Endangered Species Act consultation for the northern spotted owl, which is listed as threatened. It’s a process that could take years. According to the letter, it would create “unacceptable risks and delays to current and future timber sales.”

Timber production goals laid out by the Trump administration also could be jeopardized.

Momentum to stop the cull gained ground this summer when Sen. John Kennedy, a conservative from Louisiana, introduced a resolution to reverse the Biden-era plan.
That move reflected an unlikely alliance between some right-wing politicians and animal rights advocates who say it’s too expensive and inhumane. Some Democrats have also opposed the cull, and companion legislation in the House has bipartisan backers.

The stakes are high. Many environmentalists and scientists maintain that northern spotted owls will go extinct if their competitors aren’t kept in check. Barred owls — which originally hail from eastern North America — are larger, more aggressive and less picky when it comes to habitat and food, giving them an edge when vying for resources.

Last week, Politico’s E&E News reported that Kennedy said Interior Secretary Doug Burgum asked him to stand down from his effort to stop the owl-killing plan. The legislator told the outlet he would charge ahead anyway.

“I don’t think the federal government ought to be telling God, nature — whatever you believe in — this one can exist, this one can’t,” Kennedy told E&E. “The barred owl is not the first species that has ever moved its territory and it won’t be the last.”

Kennedy did not respond to The Times’ request for comment. A spokesperson for the Department of the Interior said they could not respond to the inquiry because of the government shutdown.

“It’s strange that a Republican in the south is taking on the owl issue, specifically, when its consequences will impact western Oregon BLM timber sales,” Joseph said in an interview. “It will lead to lower revenues for counties, it will impact jobs and it will put the spotted owl on a trajectory towards extinction.”

The stance aligns in part with that of environmental groups like the Environmental Protection Information Center and Center for Biological Diversity, which have supported culling barred owls to help the beleaguered spotted owls in their native territory. It’s an unexpected overlap, given environmentalists’ long history of fighting to protect old-growth forests in the region the owls call home.

Tom Wheeler, chief executive of EPIC, said it’s possible that culling barred owls could lead to a bump in timber harvest on the BLM land in western Oregon but overall it would lead to more habitat being protected throughout the spotted owls’ expansive range. The presence of spotted owls triggers protections under the Endangered Species Act. If the cull boosts the spotted owl population as intended, it means more guardrails.

“It puts us in admittedly an awkward place,” Wheeler said. “But our advocacy for barred owl removal is predicated not on treating the northern spotted owl as a tool against the timber industry and against timber harvest. What we’re trying to do is provide for the continued existence of the species.”

Many Native American tribes support controlling barred owls in the region. In a letter to Congress last week, the nonprofit Intertribal Timber Council said barred owls threaten more than the spotted owl.

“As a generalist predator, it poses risks to a wide range of forest and aquatic species that hold varying degrees of social and ecological importance to tribes, including species integral to traditional food systems and watershed health,” wrote the council, which aims to improve the management of natural resources important to Native American communities.

Since 2013, the Hoopa Valley tribe in Northern California has been involved with sanctioned hunting of the owls and has observed the spotted owl population stabilizing over time, according to the letter.

However, groups like Animal Wellness Action and Center for a Human Economy argue that the plan to take out so many barred owls over a vast landscape won’t work, aside from the high owl death toll. More barred owls simply will fly into where others were removed, said Wayne Pacelle, president of both groups.

That makes habitat key — and the prospect of losing more to logging in western Oregon devastating, according to Pacelle.

To stop the owl-culling plan, both chambers of Congress would need to pass a joint resolution and President Trump would need to sign it. If successful, the resolution would preclude the agency from pursuing a similar rule, unless explicitly authorized by Congress.

The plan already faced setbacks. In May, federal officials canceled three related grants totaling more than $1.1 million, including one study that would have removed barred owls from over 192,000 acres in Mendocino and Sonoma counties

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. — President Bush and Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) are like two feuding dance partners: They are doing their best to step on each other’s toes but not have anyone notice.

They flew separately halfway across the country on Wednesday, their destination an ethanol plant where together they could promote the corn-based gasoline additive as a means to reduce the nation’s reliance on imported petroleum.

Daschle then left the state. Bush stayed, speaking to political audiences and giving South Dakotans every reason he could muster to vote against Daschle’s Democratic Senate colleague, Tim Johnson.

Bush was campaigning for Rep. John R. Thune, the Republican whom the president, during a private dinner last year, helped persuade to launch a Senate run.

The Johnson-Thune race is likely to be one of the closest, most hard-fought in a year when Senate control could hinge on a single seat.

That’s the margin of the current Democratic majority in the Senate, which means that sometimes Bush and Daschle must work together, as on the ethanol issue.

As Bush noted during their joint appearance Wednesday: “Tom and I have spent some quality time together. I invite him to the Oval Office for breakfast.”

But at other times, they want nothing more than to undermine each other.

At a Thune rally Wednesday night, Bush was blunt about his preferences. “John Thune should be the next U.S. senator from South Dakota,” he told more than 5,000 people at the Sioux Falls Convention Center. “I like his values. I respect his intellect. . . . He’s not afraid to stand up for what he believes and it’s refreshing to hear his voice among the shrill partisans in Washington, D.C.”

The Bush-Daschle relationship has been in the spotlight ever since the South Dakotan was elevated to Senate majority leader last spring when Sen. James M. Jeffords of Vermont bolted the GOP.

After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Bush made a point of cultivating Daschle as an ally. Daschle’s support was key to the president’s ability to respond to the attacks with united congressional support.

Bush now holds nearly weekly breakfast meetings with Daschle and other congressional leaders, as he mentioned Wednesday. And following his speech to Congress shortly after the attacks, Bush greeted Daschle with a bear hug–an embrace that became an emblem of the post-Sept. 11 moratorium on partisanship.

But by the end of the year, Daschle had evolved from First Pal into First Adversary, battling the administration on many issues.

Republicans responded with a concerted effort to depict Daschle as the personification of Democratic obstructionism, charging he used his power to block Bush’s proposed economic stimulus package, the president’s nominees for judicial appointments and other White House initiatives.

GOP-allied advocacy groups also have aired a steady stream of television ads in South Dakota criticizing Daschle–even though he is not up for reelection until 2004.

Daschle’s supporters produced a television ad of their own in South Dakota this week, welcoming Bush to the state but calling on him to tell “out-of-state special interests” to stop the attacks.

Despite the dueling ads, Daschle was in the front row as Bush spoke at the Dakota Ethanol plant in Wentworth, S.D. Johnson, Thune and South Dakota’s Republican governor, William Janklow, also were in the front row.

“Tom, I’m honored you’d come,” Bush said.

Not mentioned was that Daschle’s presence had been the subject of awkward back-and-forth conversations between his office and the White House. At one point Tuesday, Daschle said he would not make the trip because he had been excluded from another event at which Bush and Thune were to meet with farmers for a “round-table discussion.”

He eventually agreed to go to the speech after the White House excluded Thune from the round-table.

Bush and Daschle have joined forces in backing a provision in the energy bill now that would significantly increase the amount of ethanol added to gasoline to help reduce pollution. On Tuesday, Daschle helped defeat a bid to delete the provision–an effort led by Democratic senators from California and New York who fear the ethanol requirement would dramatically hike the price of auto fuel in their states.

“I said when I was running for president I supported ethanol, and I meant it,” Bush said Wednesday. “I support it now, because not only do I know it’s important for the [agricultural] sector of our economy, it’s an important part of making sure we become less reliant on foreign sources of energy.”

After the speech, Bush stepped down from his stage, sought out Daschle and gave him a handshake and pat on the back.

“He said he’d kiss me, but people would talk,” Daschle said moments later.

The Senate majority leader added: “It’s always great to have the president of the United States talk about agriculture, talk about ethanol.”

That’s policy.

Then there’s the politics.

As Daschle returned to Washington to push the Democratic agenda, Bush focused his attention on trying to put him back in the Senate minority. He was the main attraction at a Thune fund-raiser–which White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer said would garner $350,000, the most collected at a single event in South Dakota history–and then the Thune rally.

*

Gerstenzang reported from South Dakota, Hook from Washington.