The Spotted Owl and the Forestry Industry

Want to read the rest of this paper? Join Essayworld today to view this entire essay and over 50,000 other term papers

old growth forest was left (Morrison, 1989). As a result of record timber cuts during the 1940s and 1950s by individual loggers as well as the timber and paper products industries the forest had become depleted. Failure to replant for decades had left second-growth stocks short of the 70-100 years needed for sustainable-yield cycles (Glick, 1995). What was left of the ancient forest was largely that which was on public lands, confined extensively to higher elevations (above 2500 feet) and found in isolated patches as a consequence of previous logging, road building and land clearances (Foster, 1993). In accounts of the damage that had been done, descriptions suggested that the Northwest forest had literally been cut to pieces, with the forest being in much worse condition than the Amazon in Brazil which had also suffered as a consequence of logging. On the basis of information available in the early 1990s, it was projected that the old-growth forest left on public lands would be ...

Get instant access to over 50,000 essays. Write better papers. Get better grades. Already a member? Login

to stop rapid harvesting included the use of blockading logging roads with their bodies, tree sitting, and filing a flood of legal proceedings designed to slow down and eventually halt the removal of ancient timber (Foster, 1993). After numerous efforts to find a way to stop the harvesting, including a legal struggle to have the northern spotted owl identified as an endangered species under the US Endangered Species Act of 1976, in 1988, a federal court in Seattle upheld lawsuit filed by the environmentalists. The court determined that the federal government had violated the Endangered Species Act by not engaging in efforts to preserve the habitat of the northern spotted ...

Succeed in your coursework without stepping into a library. Get access to a growing library of notes, book reports, and research papers in 2 minutes or less.

CITE THIS PAGE: