Obama Blocks Off 9.6 Million Acres for Spotted Owl Costing Lumber Industry Billions of Dollars

Obama Blocks Off 9.6 Million Acres for Spotted Owl in California, Oregon and Washington Costing Lumber Industry Billions of Dollars
On Thanksgiving Eve, the Obama Administration blocked off another 9.6 million acres in California, Oregon and Washington for the Spotted Owl. The move will cost the logging industry in this region billions of dollars.
Oregon Live reported:
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service designated 9.6 million acres of critical habitat for the northern spotted owl this morning, nearly double the last designation in 2008.
The acreage in Oregon, Washington and California won’t be off limits to logging. But the service’s decision requires heightened federal review of logging projects on lands owned by the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management, the bulk of the designated land.
The northern spotted owl has been at the center of the Northwest’s timber wars since it was listed as threatened in 1990 under the Endangered Species Act.
The listing better protected old-growth stands — the owl’s favored habitat — but drove down logging on federal lands. Harvests in Oregon’s federal forests totaled a half-billion board feet last year, down from 2.5 billion to 5 billion board feet in the 1980s.
Timber industry groups warned the expanded critical habitat could dampen efforts to increase logging on BLM lands in southwest Oregon, where rural counties are banking on revenues from increased timber sales.
The expanded area is also likely to increase lawsuits from environmental groups on individual timber sales across the spotted owl’s range, said Jim Geisinger, executive vice president of Associated Oregon Loggers.

Wild Thing’s comment.…………………..
Jobs, industries, business ( large and small) all at risk with Obama in the White House.