who gives A hoot? 255
inhMAR c , BiLL dye w R,whose controversial appointment to the federal
bench contributed to Gorton’s defeat by Adams, emerged as the owl’s
chamion. He issued a temporary restraining order barring the Forest p
Service from proceeding with 135 timber sales in spotted owl habitat
areas. Gorton was outraged. It struck him as “anti-human.” Environ-
mentalists said he was giving people false hope and populist claptrap
when what they needed was straight talk. Loggers and mill workers
needed to recognize that their way of life was simply unsustainable, and
automation was as much to blame as decades of greed and disrespect
for the environment.
The Dahlstroms and Mayrs filed suit, asserting that the set-asides vio-
lated the Grays Harbor Federal Sustained Yield Act, approved by Con-
gress in 1949. When some 1,500 timber supporters staged a protest that
briefly blocked traffic on the Riverside Bridge in Hoquiam, a main artery
of Highway 101, an annoyed motorist in a Volvo station wagon stuffed
with camping gear shouted at one burly logger, “Hey fatso, if you hadn’t
flunked sixth grade, you could get a real job!”^7
Time magazine put the owl on its cover. Inside was a breathless anthro-
pomorphic eulogy that infuriated timber country:
“[A] lumberjack presses his snarling chain saw into the flesh of a
Douglas fir that has held its
place against wind and fire,
rockslide and flood, for 200
years. The white pulpy fiber
scatters in a plume beside him,
and in 90 seconds, 4 ft. of sear-
ing steel have ripped through
the thick bark, the thin film of
living tissue and the growth
rings spanning ages. With an
excruciating groan, all 190 ft.
of trunk and green spire crash to
earth. When the cloud of detri-
tus and needles settles, the an-
cient forest of the Pacific North-
west has retreated one more
step. Tree by tree, acre by acre,
it falls, and with it vanishes the
habitat of innumerable crea-
tures. None among these crea-
The spotted owl makes the cover of Time
in 1990.