Very soon, the federal government may authorize the killing of nearly a half-million barred owls in the Pacific Northwest in a desperate bid to save the northern spotted owl. The killing could go on for decades.
As philosophers in Oregon whose work focuses on scientific and ethical issues regarding animals and the environment, we believe that the reasons given for this mass slaughter are deeply problematic. More broadly, this attempt to pick ecological winners and losers in a rapidly changing world shows how ill equipped the Endangered Species Act is to protect rare and important ecosystems.
Barred and spotted owls are related species that probably diverged about seven million years ago. Barred owls, which are considered native to the eastern United States, are increasingly appearing in the Pacific Northwest’s old-growth forests where the threatened northern spotted owls breed and live. Where the two birds overlap, the barred owls tend to outcompete the northern spotted owls, taking the best nest sites and harassing, killing or occasionally mating with spotted owls.
In the 1980s, the northern spotted owl became the centerpiece of a bitter controversy over the logging of old-growth forests, which it depends on for its survival. By 1990, its numbers had dwindled to the point that the federal government classified the bird as “threatened,” which led to sharp limits on logging in its territory. Nonetheless, its number have continued to decline because of the ongoing loss of its habitat — and the competition with the barred owl.
After a period of experimentation and debate, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, which oversees the Endangered Species Act, has concluded that it must protect spotted owls by permitting federal, state and tribal governmental agencies, private companies and individuals to shoot 470,900 barred owls over the next 30 years. The killings could begin soon.
Although the agency refers to barred owls as “invasive” on the West Coast — meaning they have moved into new territory where they are threatening native species — it isn’t even clear that barred owls are unnatural interlopers. Barred owls are thought to have migrated from the eastern United States through the Great Plains and southern Canada, eventually making their way to British Columbia and then on to Washington, Oregon and California. As this story goes, the barred owls’ arrival is a recent event.
However, there is genomic evidence that the barred owl has in fact resided in the Pacific Northwest for thousands of years. The genetic and phenotypic differences between western and eastern barred owl populations are too great to have occurred under the timeline in which the western barred owl is a new arrival. That evidence throws a wrench in the narrative that the barred owls are new arrivals, and so can be considered invasive, and yet that evidence is barely mentioned in the fish and wildlife agency’s most recent Environmental Impact Statement proposing the mass killings.
As more plants and animals move to novel habitats, these sorts of conflicts will occur increasingly often, and keeping things as they once were will require more and more intervention. Conservation prioritizes protecting species and ecosystems, but the harms to individual barred owls will be tremendous. Constant killing to keep ecosystems from changing in an already volatile world is a dystopian, rear-guard conservation strategy.
Many philosophers, conservation biologists and ecologists are skeptical of the idea that we should restore current environments to so-called historical base lines, as this plan tries to do. In North America, the preferred base line for conservation is usually just before the arrival of Europeans. (In Western forests, this is often pegged to 1850, when significant logging began.) But life has existed on Earth for 3.7 billion years. Any point we choose as the “correct” base line will either be arbitrary or in need of a strong defense.
Restoring or preserving those historical base lines is only going to get more difficult. In some cases, it will be impossible — and this might be one of them. It is unclear that killing barred owls will do anything but merely slow the northern spotted owl’s eventual extinction. When barred owls were previously removed in a before-and-after experiment in areas of Oregon and Washington, the number of northern spotted owls still declined. The removal slowed that decline, but even with the planned killings, the barred owl is here in the West to stay.
We should strive to care for ecosystems given their current ecological realities. Ecosystems are dynamic and have always changed over time as organisms move around. And now, humans are inescapable drivers of ecological changes. Climate change and wildfire have accelerated the dynamism of ecosystems. Killing barred owls will not restore the forests to the way they were in 1850.
And yet even as they change, those forests are worthy of protection both in their own right and because of the ecological functions they perform. President Biden signed an executive order to conserve old-growth forests because they capture and store enormous amounts of carbon. Without them, our fight against climate change is made much more difficult. In a rapidly shifting world where many species are at risk, conserving ecological functions may be the most important conservation target.
Worryingly, the main legal mechanism for protecting these vitally important forests ties them to the fate of the northern spotted owl. Habitat protection under the Endangered Species Act lasts only as long as the threatened or endangered species remains threatened or endangered. Under our current laws, without these threatened owls or a leader like President Biden who cares about old-growth, these beloved forests may disappear.
Current policy offers us a choice between a forest out of time, engineered to look more like the forests of old only by a hail of bullets, or nothing at all. We would rather work with the forest as it is now and as it adapts and changes. The Endangered Species Act has done much for conservation, but this troubling battle of owl versus owl shows that we need to add new laws that can directly protect economically, ecologically and culturally important ecosystems.
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