Judge signs off on timber agreement
Commercial activities outside owl habitat, harvesting of U.S. Capitol Christmas tree in N.M. now allowed
U.S. District Court Judge Raner Collins on Wednesday signed off on a legal agreement allowing commercial timber activities outside protected Mexican spotted owl habitat in New Mexico’s national forests.
The decision by the Arizona-based judge modifies a previously issued court-ordered injunction barring timber companies from the state’s national forests, thus allowing companies to resume most timber projects so long as they’re not within protected owl territory.
That includes allowing a crew into Carson National Forest to cut down the U.S. Capitol Christmas tree, which is slated for a crosscountry journey to Washington, D.C. The previous court order had stopped Christmas tree cutting until the court approved the new agreement.
The Santa Fe-based environmental group WildEarth Guardians and the U.S. Forest Service filed a stipulated agreement before the judge earlier this week.
The group’s executive director, John Horning, had agreed with the Forest Service that the previous injunction was much more restrictive than it needed to be to protect the threatened spotted owl.
“We are obviously happy,” Horning said. “We do not believe that any of the activities that we agreed to release from the injunction, whether they were trail maintenance or ceremonial uses of trees or the Capitol Christmas tree … were never a serious threat to the owl.”
But WildEarth Guardians and the U.S. Forest Service are still at odds over whether the service has enough data to show whether other temporarily paused timber projects are harming the Mexican spotted owl.
Horning’s group will in a week file another brief responding to a request from the Forest Service that had asked the judge to essentially overturn the modified court order and allow logging within owl habitat.
Horning argues that at least half of the commercial timber projects had been within Mexican spotted owl territory.
The brown-and-white mottled owl was listed as “threatened” in 1993 under the federal Endangered Species Act after much of its habitat had been destroyed by more than a century of Southwest logging.
The Forest Service is required by the act to come up with a plan to boost the species’ population enough that it is removed from the “threatened” list. As part of that plan, it is supposed to conduct research demonstrating that commercial activity it allows is not harming the owl.
Judge Collins agreed with
WildEarth Guardians in his September injunction that the Forest Service had done neither. The Forest Service disagrees and is still asking the court to overturn that order and allow business to continue as usual.
The service argues that it has sufficient data to demonstrate such activities have not and are not harming the spotted owl population.
“We continue to extend our gratitude to our state and federal partners and countless community leaders for their continued support. We are committed to being as open and transparent as possible in notifying interested groups and individuals when we take steps aimed at alleviating the stressors of the recent court-ordered injunction,” regional forester Cal Joyner said in a statement.