Posted on 11/28/2012 5:50:42 AM PST by Kaslin
Welcome to the pretzel logic of liberal environmental protection: In order to "save" owls, the Obama administration is going to shoot them dead.
This is not -- I repeat not -- an Onion parody.
Over the Thanksgiving holiday, the White House released a big fat policy turkey: its final critical habitat rule for the endangered northern spotted owl. The Obama plan will lock up 9.6 million acres of land (mostly, but not all, federal) in Oregon, Washington and northern California. This is nearly double the acreage set aside by the Bush administration. Thousands of timber workers (along with untold thousands of related support jobs) will be threatened in the name of sparing a few thousand spotted owls from extinction.
As House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Doc Hastings, R-Wash., pointed out earlier this year, timber-dependent counties hit hard by the federal land grab and unending environmental litigation remain racked by high unemployment. "The loss in economic activity caused by the original spotted owl plan caused an astounding decrease in federal tax receipts of nearly $700 million per year -- all from rural Northwest communities."
Despite two decades of massive government intervention and the near-destruction of the northwest timber industry, the furry bird is vanishing faster than ever. According to the Smithsonian Magazine, "(t)imber harvest on 24 million acres of federal land had dropped 90 percent from its heyday" by the year 2000. Yet, northern spotted owls are now "disappearing three times faster than biologists had feared." Indeed, spotted owl populations in key parts of Washington State "are half what they were in the 1980s." And overall, the bird has seen a 40 percent decline over the past 25 years, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Punishing loggers and bringing the timber industry to its knees have made vengeful environmental groups fat and happy. But the northern spotted owl they claim to care so much about is catastrophically worse off thanks to green zealotry. One root cause: habitat loss (thanks in part to raging wildfires resulting from poor forest management and green opposition to thinning/controlled burns).
The other major, nonhuman culprit: the barred owl.
These barred owls began migrating from the East Coast in the 1950s, and the USFWS reports that the larger, more aggressive and more adaptable birds "are known to displace spotted owls, disrupt their nesting and compete with them for food." Barred owls are more prolific breeders, less finicky about their food and less picky about where they live. They also don't bow down before the Endangered Species Act or the hallowed "threatened" status of its weaker brethren. They are brutal predators known to slam into spotted owls, slicing them with their talons and decapitating them in their nests.
Conservation groups whine that barred owls are victims of "scapegoating." But USFWS Director Dan Ashe spoke the truth earlier this year: "We can't ignore the mounting evidence that competition from barred owls is a major factor in the spotted owl's decline."
Instead of admitting failure and letting nature take its course, however, command-and-control bureaucrats have appointed themselves Mother Nature's judges, juries and executioners. Their "main priority" is "reducing competition from barred owls." How? By gunning them down. Final details are still in the works, but the agency has floated past removal schemes that involve "luring territorial barred owls into close range ... using recorded calls and an owl decoy. ... A shotgun would be used to prevent wounding and ensure rapid and humane death." Experts say such an eradication plan would need to continue for centuries.
Twenty years of regulatory salvation have failed the northern spotted owl. Who believes that another top-down government exercise in species engineering -- this time backed with bullets -- will do the trick? When the government picks winners and losers, taxpayers always get screwed. No matter the job losses. No matter the death toll. Arrogant and unaccountable central planners never give a hoot.
Bump
ping
the goobermint can hire displaced lumberjacks to blast the mean Yankee owls. win win. /s
Question: Why is it called the “Northern Spotted Owl?”
Answer: Because below a certain arbitrary latitude, the “Southern Spotted Owl” (the EXACT same critter) is doing just fine, thank you.
So the spotted owl is still dying no matter that all the kings horses and all the kings men are trying to put them back together again at the cost of thousands of families lives and the forest being managed worse than ever.
The environmentalists have been able to make the forest more vulnerable to forest fires by no management and then when the forest burns the environmentalists will not allow the dead trees to be harvested and replanted. I have seen thousand acre burned forests covered with weeds and dead trees filled with disease and bugs that are 10-17 years old.
So now for 19 years since Clinton's administration locked up our #1 natural resource, trees, the federal government has given $50 Million per year to about 5 counties here in Southern Oregon to help pay for the county government because they took away the counties main source of revenue. Every year our county commissioners have to fly to DC and spend weeks there begging for them not to cut our "hand out" to survive. Douglas, Coos and Curry counties have the most productive douglas fir ground in the world, in the heyday of production one mill sent over 10 million a year in tax revenue to the state and feds, one mill. Most all are gone now and the ability to run them or get them up and running again is being lost on the next generation.
Now we know why the government has been buying all that ammunition.
What? You mean that this godless government doesn’t believe its hero, Darwin, when he taught the doctrine of “the survival of the fittest”? How dare stinking bureaucrats interfere with Nature’s wise ways?
Hypocrites.
Outstanding! We should make the Barred Owl the new Free Republic mascot.
Unlike spotted owls, barred owls aren’t an endangered species. They are an invasive species like pythons in the Everglades that are eradicating indigenous Everglades wildlife. I see no problem reducing their numbers in the spotted owls habitat to help the spotted owls survive.
Reducing barred owl numbers.
I have hunted that area and talked to loggers.
Do you know what work is available to unemployed loggers? Fighting forest fires.
Do you know what unemployed loggers do when they run out of money? SET FOREST FIRES!
I’m not saying every one of them does this. It only takes a few.
That’s what the locals told me.
No bird, fish, bug, or animal, no matter how rare or “endangered,” should EVER come before the life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness of any human being who wants to work for his living in our country.
That the federal government routinely commits this unconstitutional crime against its citizenry is just one more indicator that it’s far past time to scrub and reboot.
And thank you for the p***ed-me-off ping, Sensei.
No bird, fish, bug, or animal, no matter how rare or “endangered,” should EVER come before the life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness of any human being who wants to work for his living in our country.
So the hell with God’s Creation if it interferes with your pursuit of happiness, eh?
The pursuit of happiness is a fundamental Constitutional right, given to us by God. I said NOTHING about my pursuit of happiness.
So, put loggers out of work to save a bird? And putting the loggers out of work caused the birds to die off anyway.
How smart or according to God's Plan for Creation is THAT?
The loggers lives are destroyed, a God-given natural resource is wasted and destroyed, and the birds are destroyed.
Now think about exactly who is saying to hell with God's Creation. Even in the face of the disastrous outcome, the enviro-weenies and the g'ment WILL NOT CHANGE THEIR TACTICS.
Whose side are you on?
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