Front Group Claims Owls Learning to Love Logging

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Spotted Owl Source: Sierra Club

The Executive Director of the Evergreen Foundation, James Peterson, argues in a Wall Street Journal opinion article that the decline of the spotted owl in the U.S. Pacific Northwest is not due to logging in old-growth forests. Peterson, who has been given a string of awards by various logging industry groups, referred to an unspecified "privately funded" study which "infers an inverse relationship between harvesting and owls." This, he argues, justifies "a long-term thinning program," an oblique reference to the Bush administration's Orwellian-sounding Healthy Forests Initiative, a program to log national forests. The Evergreen Foundation says it works to "restore public confidence in forestry." The foundation's website states that funders include logging and logging equipment companies, including Boise Cascade, Potlatch, Westvaco, Mead, Caterpillar and Timberjack. The foundation's logging industry funding, however, wasn't mentioned in Peterson's Wall Street Journal article.