Seattle

MET in person, the northern spotted owl seems an unlikely casus belli. Last Friday, the Woodland Park Zoo here allowed me a private audience with its three captive owls, a mating pair and a lone elderly female, each of whom resembled a miniature, flecked-brown overcoat of Harris tweed. Their eyes  unlike the eyes of most owls, which are bright yellow  were the color of dark chocolate. Blinking slowly, rooted to their perches, they looked more wistful than wise, dreaming, perhaps, of flying squirrels, on which they like to dine in the wild, or of extinction, which still appears their likeliest fate.

The fast-disappearing owl was listed as “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act 20 years ago last week. At the time, it was the ideal “indicator species” of the health of Northwest old-growth forest habitat  the squelchy, dank-smelling, multistory ecosystem, where the ground is strewn with rotting ancient trees, called “snags” and “nurse logs,” and the jungled undergrowth of ferns, vines, berries, moss and fungi shelters a great multitude of creatures, from bears and cougars to newts and banana slugs. It was this irreplaceable ecosystem, centuries in the making, that environmentalists were really trying to protect under the terms of the act (whose first declared purpose is to conserve the ecosystems upon which endangered and threatened species depend); and the owl was their best available legal tool.

Environmentalists saw the land as a sacred space, to be venerated and conserved in honor of what Emerson called “the occult relation between man and the vegetable.” But for the timber industry, long accustomed to clear-cutting in federal forests, it was a commodity, a renewable resource to be cut down, regrown and cut down again. There was no reconciling the two philosophies. On one side, the forest primeval, the murmuring pines and the hemlocks, the inviolate wilderness; on the other, people and their histories and traditions, jobs, communities, an economy based entirely on timber.

When the owl was listed, the timber industry in the Pacific Northwest was already facing difficulties for economic reasons, but in the ailing milling and logging towns, the hapless owl was seized on as the scapegoat. In January 1991, an Olympic National Park ranger found a spotted owl nailed to a sign by the road to the visitor center, a red-tipped kitchen match protruding from its breast, and a typewritten note attached to the corpse. “If you think your parks and wilderness don’t have enough of these suckers, plant this one,” it read. “They talk of social unrest. The match has yet to be struck.”