Posted on 08/01/2007 8:40:08 PM PDT by NormsRevenge
SEATTLE - A federal judge issued a preliminary injunction Wednesday to stop Weyerhaeuser Co. from logging in spotted owl habitat on four parcels of private land in Washington.
U.S. District Judge Marsha J. Pechman did not grant, however, an additional request by the Seattle Audubon Society to stop the state of Washington from granting permits to log in spotted owl habitat.
The injunction from logging covers spotted owl habitat within 2.7 miles of the center of four circles of land in southwestern Washington that are owned by Weyerhaeuser.
"It really shows the Endangered Species Act still has some teeth in it," said Kenan Block, a spokesman for the Washington Forest Law Center.
Weyerhaeuser spokesman Frank Mendizabal said the company was disappointed in some aspects of Pechman's ruling but did not think the injunction would affect its operations in the short term because Weyerhaeuser is not currently logging in the 50,000 acres in question.
He said Weyerhaeuser has been working with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to study and protect spotted owls and will continue to manage the land in a way it feels is consistent with the judge's order.
"We're confident that Washington state and Weyerhaeuser will prevail when the matter is decided" at trial sometime next year, Mendizabal said.
The owl was declared a threatened species in 1990 under the federal Endangered Species Act primarily because of heavy logging in the old growth forests where it nests and feeds. While old growth forests suitable for owl habitat have increased, owl numbers have continued to decline. The spotted owl also faces a new threat from a cousin, the barred owl, that has been invading its territory.
The state of Washington actually fought against listing the spotted owl as endangered. They knew better. Their own wildlife biologists had been observing spotted owls for almost a dozen years and fully well knew that the birds nested and reared young in second growth timber. The old growth mantra was so much poo-poo. This instance is just more of the same - barnyard manure.
Libertarian ping! To be added or removed from my ping list freepmail me or post a message here.
And everybody knows what happens to owl killers behind bars.
Just wondering what would happen if Weyerhaeuser announced they wanted to clear the forest to grow corn for ethanol?
These folks wouldn’t have let us leave the Horn of Africa because we’d be interfering with Woolly Mammoth habitat.
Species go extinct. It happens. Really.
There was a recent (last 30 days or so) story about the decline of the spotted owls. It seems they were being attacked and consumed by another predatory owl species and that caused a significant decline in numbers. I’ll bet Weyerhauser bred the predators just to find and kill the spotted owls. Those black-hearted b******s!
Actually it shows there are still some dumba$$ judges in Washington State who are more than willing to prove they are dumba$$es.
Now now now, you can't just go around shooting judges, temping as it might me.
Don’t feel sorry for Weyerhaeuser, it is common knowledge that they were privately backing the environmentalist when this first came up in the late 80s. The ban was only on publicly held lands, state and federal. It did not include private lands in which Weyerhaeuser has the largest holding in Washington State.
The small logging and mill companies were dependent on government timber sales. Those are the ones the ban hurt the most and went out of business leaving Weyerhaeuser and a few other big companies that owned their own timber to be the only game in town and to price their products accordingly.
The donations to the Sierra Club and others were a write off and were more than made up for by the higher prices they were able to charge for their products.
They have had 17 years to log with little or no effect by the ban. When this all shakes out, it will have little or no adverse effect on them.
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