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The Trump administration stripped habitat protections for the northern spotted owl—opening millions of acres of forest in the West to logging and all but guaranteeing the owl's demise. Now, the Biden administration is restoring those protections, because the Trump rollback was based on 'faulty' science.
The Biden administration made a Trump-era U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service memo public, showing that agency staffers warned Trump's political appointees that the dramatic loss of habitat protections would lead to the owl's extinction.
"If DOI excludes the large amount of critical habitat … and this exclusion leads to subsequent habitat management on these lands that is inconsistent with the current [federal] land management plans, it is my opinion it will preclude the recovery of the [northern spotted owl]. Most scientists (myself included) would conclude that such an outcome will, therefore, result in the eventual extinction of the listed subspecies," USFWS biologist Paul Henson wrote in a Dec. 9, 2020 email.
Still, former Interior Secretary David Bernhardt defended his decision to remove protections for 3.4 million acres of owl habitat. Bernhardt told the Associated Press that the agency’s “reasonable certainty” the owl would go extinct did not match the legal requirement that habitat be protected lest a species “will” go extinct.
The Biden administration will restore protections for roughly 9.4 million acres of critical habitat for the owl. That's 204,294 acres less than the original designation. The amount of habitat protected for the owl has flip-flopped based on who is in the White House since 1992, when 6.9 million acres of critical habitat for the owl was protected under George H.W. Bush.
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You promised to address the climate crisis with the urgency it deserves... Selling more than 80 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico for oil and gas development just days after the international climate talks makes a mockery of those commitments.”
