Owls and jobs

Your feature article of Nov. 21-22 portrayed the spotted owls as a bogeyman threatening the timber industry of the Pacific Northwest; in fact, it is a scapegoat used by the timber industry to cover their poor planning.

As an advisor to the White House Task Force on the Spotted Owl, I have read thousands of pages analyzing this issue, and it is clear the loss of jobs is occurring primarily because the industry has failed to prepare for the inevitable end of a period of “mining” old-growth forests, even though economic analyses predicted the problem more than 20 years ago.

Now the choice is: 1) save the owl and scores of other species associated with old-growth forests while losing jobs, or 2) continue cutting old-growth forests for five to 10 years at which time we will lose both the jobs and the old-growth wildlife. Malcolm Hunter University of Maine College of Forest Resources