Remember the big controversy 16 years ago with the endangered spotted owls in pacific northwest forests? Well, no, you probably don't. Environmentalists who wanted to stop logging in the national forests latched onto the unutterably cute li'l owls as a perfect excuse to, well, stop logging. According to an article in the Wall Street Journal today, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has decided it is now time to go about recovering the declining species. The problem: The spotted owls have already declined most of the way, but not because of logging. No, this time it's because barred owls have moved in and are killing the spotted owls off. As far as anyone can tell, spotted owls don't actually care one way or the other about having classic old-growth forests.
Not that it matters, because saving the spotted owls was only ever a political move. If people cared, would they have waited 16 years to decide something ought to be done about their endangered mascot?
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