Published on Thursday, May 31, 2007 by The Oregonian
Bush Bureaucrats Rewrote Owl Plan
by Dominick A. DellaSala
The Bush administration recently proposed a “recovery” plan for the threatened northern spotted owl that could allow increased old-growth logging in the Pacific Northwest. If you wonder how cutting down the forests where the owl lives would help bring the owl back from the brink of extinction, look no further than the Bush administration’s track record.
Administration officials have a documented history of manipulating science to serve special interests. The U.S Fish and Wildlife Service is publicly misrepresenting the process by which the draft recovery plan was developed, the scientific validity of the plan and the threats to the owl by continuing on the present course.
I served on the recovery team that submitted a draft recovery plan last September to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
A short time later, the team was notified that a secret “oversight committee” in Washington, D.C., had rejected the draft and directed us to change the plan substantially, de-emphasizing the well-documented connection between spotted owl survival and its old-growth forest habitat.
The oversight committee included Julie MacDonald, the deputy assistant Interior secretary who recently resigned after an Inspector General’s investigation found she had altered scientific conclusions to accommodate the demands of special-interest lobbyists.
The administration’s recently released draft northern spotted owl recovery plan bears little resemblance to the one crafted by the recovery team. .....(more)
The complete piece is at:
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/05/29/1556/
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