Donald Trump’s appointees used ‘faulty’ science

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Political appointees in the Trump administration have relied on false science to justify removing habitat protections for the endangered northern spotted owl, U.S. wildlife officials said Tuesday as they violated a rule which will open up millions of acres of forest in Oregon, Washington and California to logging potential.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reversed a decision made five days before Trump left the post to drastically reduce the so-called critical habitat for the spotted owl. The small, reclusive bird has been declining for decades as old-growing forests have disappeared.

The Associated Press got details on the action on Tuesday before it was made public.

Government biologists have opposed the changes under Trump and warned they would put the spotted owl on a path to extinction, documents show.

But Trump’s Interior Secretary David Bernhardt and former Fish and Wildlife Service Director Aurelia Skipwith dismissed those concerns – instead adopting a plan to remove restrictions on more land than the timber industry sought.

Officials said in documents provided to the AP that Bernhardt and Skipwith underestimated the threat of extinction and relied on a misinterpretation of science to reach their decision.

Bernhardt defended his handling of the matter, telling the AP in an email that Congress had given the interior secretary the authority to exclude areas from protection.

Bernhardt said the agency’s “reasonable assurance” that the owl would disappear did not match the law’s requirement to protect the habitat so that a species would “disappear”.

If wildlife officials want to change that standard, Bernhardt added, “they should ask for a change from Congress.”

“Any future Secretary may vary the benefit factors, but they cannot change the law or the legal standard,” Bernhardt wrote.

Officials have twice delayed the changes after President Joe Biden took office and it no longer took effect. That puts them on many Trump -era policies that the Interior Department has overturned or struck in recent months on issues from drilling for oil and gas on some public lands to protections for birds from the wind farm. .

Democratic lawmakers from Oregon, Washington and California in February called for an investigation into the removal of spotted owl protections, citing potential scientific interference by Trump’s nominees.

Wildlife advocates, government agencies and the timber industry have been sparring for decades with the northern spotted owl, which is now on a very rapid decline and nearing extinction from Washington and some parts. of Oregon.

The federal habitat protections imposed in 2012 are meant to prevent bird extinction. They were also blamed for the slowdown in logging that has devastated some rural communities.

Of the 9.6 million protected acres (3.9 million acres), federal officials proposed in August 2020 to remove protections by nearly 2%.

The timber industry said the plan had not reached enough and called for the removal of more than 28%. In January, Skipwith abruptly changed his agency’s recommendation and went further, telling Bernhardt that more than one-third of the protected land, or nearly 3.5 million acres (1.4 million acres), should be excluded from protection.

The land has large swaths of timber and includes 2 million acres (809,000 acres) scattered in a checkerboard pattern in western Oregon.

Logging on those lands may not immediately kill the owls – they live up to 20 years in individual territories that can reach 10,000 acres (4,000 acres) – but eventually they will disappear, says Paul Henson , the Oregon wildlife service supervisor. .

When Henson brought his concerns to superiors in December, Skipwith overtook them.

“You can’t remove more than a third of the habitat of an endangered species and you don’t expect it to disappear,” Henson said in an interview. “There isn’t much disagreement about science. The disagreement is how dangerous it is to hinder the secretary’s authority” to remove residential protections.

The logging industry says more thinning and management of protected forests is needed to prevent wildfires, which devastated 560 square miles (1,450 square kilometers) of spotted owl habitat last fall. Much of that area is no longer considered viable for birds.

Timber interests also say some of the lands set aside under the announcement on Tuesday are not actually spotted owl habitat or divided into parcels too small to support the owl. As such, the smaller habitat designation provided under Trump is “legal and scientifically valid,” said Nick Smith, a spokesman for the American Forest Resource Council. The group represents approximately 100 manufacturing and logging operations in five western U.S. states.

“The federal government cannot set aside critical habitat unless it is habitat for the species,” Smith said.

The logging industry says larger, non -native barred owls are a bigger threat than cutting down trees. Skipwith underscores that argument when he says the most effective way to keep spotted owls is to control illegal owl numbers.

“The main threats facing the northern spotted owl are the barred owl and the devastating forest fire,” Skipwith said, adding that he used great science to reach his conclusion. “This is not an issue of acres; it is a land management issue. ”

Barred owls, native to the eastern U.S., began to affect the spotted numbers of owls in Washington and Oregon about a decade ago as they spread west and south. The banned invasion of owls has accelerated in recent years, putting spotted owls on a downward trajectory that could prompt them to disappear from some areas within ten years, the U.S. says. Department of Agriculture research biologist Alan Franklin.

Biologists have studied since 2009 the impact of barred owl removal in areas in northern California, Oregon and Washington with smaller spotted owls. The pilot program, which ended in August, showed spotted owl numbers stabilized when barred owls were reduced. They continue to descend in areas with no departures.

The authors of the study warn that the results show habitat protections are also critical to the safety of the spotted owl.

In rejecting Trump’s rule, federal officials said the dual threat of wildfires and competition from the barred owl underscores why more forests need protection – to ensure there is enough “redundancy” of habitat that a large fire will not harm the species.

A large -scale barred owl removal program is out of place. Wildlife officials say the best science show protecting older forests – where owls nest, roost and hunt – is important.

Owl expert RJ Gutiérrez from the University of Minnesota agrees. He said the preservation of habitat in the forest and naming the northern spotted owl as an endangered species in the 1990s briefly boosted it before the banned owls arrived.

Until blocked owls are not addressed, “all habitat is critical” so that spotted owls can find shelter from aggressive newcomers, says Gutiérrez who has spent decades studying spotted owls on the West Coast.

Environmental groups welcomed the move on Tuesday but expressed frustration that about 200,000 acres (about 81,000 acres) of formerly protected habitat were excluded under new rules published Tuesday that replace those under Trump.

“Over the past 20 years, there has been an accelerated loss of old-growth forest on state and private lands so it continues to lose habitat,” said Noah Greenwald at the Center for Biological Diversity. Climate change adds to the threats, he said.

In December, federal officials determined that the continued decline of the northern spotted owl meant it deserved a more critical list as “endangered.”

The agency declined to do so immediately, saying other species had become a priority. That decision faces a legal challenge.

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Reprinted with permission from The Associated Press.

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