Killing barred owls isn’t the way to to save northern spotted owls, says group of Oregon philosophers

The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service has proposed killing hundreds of thousands of barred owls over the next 30 years in an effort to protect the endangered northern spotted owl, which competes with the barred owl for food, habitat and other resources. The agency published a final environmental impact statement last month, and a decision on whether to adopt the strategy could be imminent.

A group of philosophers at Oregon universities recently took issue with the proposal. In a New York Times opinion piece, they described the strategy and the reasoning behind it as “dystopian” and “deeply problematic.”

Jay Odenbaugh is the James F. Miller Professor of Humanities at Lewis & Clark College. He co-authored the article and joins us to talk about the ethical pitfalls of sacrificing one species for another.

This transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Last year, we talked to two officials from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service after the agency proposed authorizing people to shoot over 400,000 barred owls over the next three decades, in order to save endangered northern spotted owls. That plan has been steadily moving its way through the federal bureaucracy and it could be approved any day now.

Jay Odenbaugh cautions that that might be a mistake. He is the James F. Miller Professor of Humanities at Lewis & Clark College and one of three Oregon philosophers who wrote an op-ed in The New York Times last week, calling into question the ethics of this plan. He joins us now. It’s good to have you on the show.

Jay Odenbaugh: Thanks for having me.

Miller: We’ve talked a lot about spotted owls over the years. We’ve heard from wildlife biologists, from federal officials, from foresters, and loggers, and environmental activists, and writers. What does it mean to approach this issue as an ethicist, as a philosopher?

Odenbaugh: That’s a great question. Whenever we have conservation policy like this, there are scientific questions about what will work and questions around data. But for a philosopher like us and myself in particular, what I’m interested in is the conflicts. The ways in which values find themselves in conflict with one another. In the northern spotted owl case right now, we have a conflict between two owls, about how to proceed and how to protect the northern spotted owl. And should we kill another owl to save it?

Miller: The agency says, and I’ve long heard, that barred owls are essentially an invasive species that is out-competing northern spotted owls for food, for habitat, for other resources. You and your co-authors argue that that might not be the case. Why not?

Odenbaugh: So there are a couple of issues that we zero in on. One of them is not so much about the competition. The barred owl certainly is running the northern spotted owl out of old growth. One of the things we wonder about is whether, in fact, the barred owl is actually an invasive. There has been recent genetic evidence that suggests that the barred owl might have been here much longer than we first thought. The traditional studies have shown that, or at least purported to show that, the barred owl has been here somewhere between 80 and 130 years. That’s when they migrated from the east coast. Recent genetic analysis suggests that they might have been here as long as 7,000 years. And that is a challenge to the idea that they are a recent interloper.

Miller: So let’s say that recent genetic analysis is accurate. Let’s just put that forward as a fact. Let’s say we know it’s true. Then what? How does that change the way you think about this proposal?

Odenbaugh: So the scientists obviously dispute all sorts of things and these things will be worked out in the journals. But let’s suppose, like you say, that the barred owl is not invasive. If it’s not, then essentially what the federal government would be doing is picking one owl over another. Now, you might think when it comes to certain cases that’s reasonable. But our worry here is that to save something like between 8,000 and 10,000 northern spotted owls, you’d have to kill almost half a million barred owls over the next 30 years. And that sort of asymmetry or difference in numbers is huge. So we worry about that and maybe the precedent it would set.

Miller: I want to play you something that Kessina Lee said on our show last year. She is the state supervisor of Oregon’s U.S. Fish & Wildlife office:

Kessina Lee [recording]: When we’re talking about the likely extinction of a species, you know, however unpalatable and uncomfortable the conversation is of lethal removal of another species, people generally accept that this is sometimes necessary. We’re talking about, rather than choosing to conserve one bird over the other, this is about conserving two species. Spotted owls are fighting for their existence right now. Whereas, even if the Service was able to remove the number of barred owls over the next 30 years, considered in the plan, that would represent less than 1% of the global population of barred owls.

Miller: So, couldn’t you just skip the question of what’s native, just look at these raw population numbers and say that since we’ve decided as a society that we want to live in a world where the northern spotted owl exists, and because there are orders of magnitude more barred owls than spotted owls, we are justified in actively killing a huge number of barred owls?

Odenbaugh: Another really good question. Part of my worry here is that there was an original experiment where, in Washington, Oregon and California, barred owls were selectively removed. And the idea was to see what would happen to the northern spotted owl – would it rebound? And what happened was that the numbers of northern spotted owls slowed the decline, or it helped them. But they continued to decline. So one of the things I worry about is killing half a million barred owls for something that we’re not confident will work in saving the northern spotted owl.

Miller: In fact, I brought that exact issue up with these U.S. Fish & Wildlife officials last year. And basically, they said, “Yes, but maybe enough time hadn’t passed, enough breeding cycles hadn’t passed. Maybe this would work.” But they didn’t have an answer with more surety than that, I guess is the way I would put it.

Another big issue, a philosophical issue here, is the role of humans in this, broadly. The huge reason that northern spotted owls are in such dire straits is that we humans have cut down most of their old growth habitat. Human development and migration are a big reason for the spread of barred owls in the West. And we’re obviously the cause of anthropogenic climate change. It’s built into that phrase. So our fingerprints are over all of this. How do you think about the question of human responsibility, given what we have already done?

Odenbaugh: Well, I think regardless of what we do, in terms of either killing barred owls or not, we laid the foundations for the problems we’re facing. We’re seeing climate change, changing our forests, wildfire and a history of fire suppression. So, as you say, our fingerprints are all over the place.

From a moral point of view, one of the things I worry about is, if we were to kill barred owls, it’s us intervening in deeper and more profound ways and scales that are remarkable. It would be as if my son were to steal something and I said, “Well, because everyone’s stealing, we should keep on stealing.” If what’s happening, killing all these barred owls, with some uncertainty around them being invasive and us not being sure that this would actually work, I think it just heightens the moral issues – namely, we would be killing an enormous number of owls to save a much, much smaller number.

Miller: A really big challenge that you and your co-authors bring in – and I should mention that you wrote this op-ed in the New York Times with Portland State University philosopher Avram Hiller, and the Oregon Institute of Technology philosopher Yasha Rohwer – you call into question the practice of managing wildlife to some kind of historical baseline, trying to bring back the status quo from the past. So first of all, what is the status quo that’s sort of the North Star here?

Odenbaugh: So when we think about trying to find some past time to restore to, often we might put that to something either pre-Columbian or pre-human. It would depend on the particular ecosystem. But the idea is we restore it to some particular baseline. And one of the things that we’re worried about is that many of these baselines seem arbitrary. And they require a defense. The second worry is that ecosystems are changing and being transformed all of the time, especially now with anthropogenic influences. And so trying to reach back and hold the present, fixed to the past, is increasingly difficult.

We are big enthusiasts of the Endangered Species Act. And we do believe the northern spotted owl habitat, old growth, should be protected. So we are pushing for the idea that maybe we should be protecting ecosystems in their own right, partly because of this dynamic transformation and realizing that baselines are really hard to hit.

Miller: What would it mean to, as you write, “strive to care for ecosystems, given their current ecological realities.” I mean what should that look like after we have so changed, so imbalanced these ecosystems, and they’re changing right now so dramatically?

Odenbaugh: So one of the wonderful things that we get, for free, from old growth forests in the Pacific Northwest is carbon sequestration and storage. These trees absorb so much carbon that helps us deal with a problem like climate change. So we are emphasizing the idea that not only protecting threatened and endangered species is important, but also things like ecosystem function and services – these are really important. And so we encourage legislators and policymakers to think about new regulation and law that might directly protect those, even while the species in them are changing and some will go extinct.

Miller: That’s, I think, an important point. It’s something that we talked around or talked a little bit about when we were having a series of anniversary conversations about the Endangered Species Act. The idea that this has been used as a way to maintain ecosystems or habitats, even though, technically, it seems more specifically about helping individual species. So what would you like to see specifically, in terms of legislation that would explicitly safeguard habitat-wide ecosystems, instead of a particular salamander, or newt, or snail, or frog, or owl?

Odenbaugh: There was some discussion of this in the 1980s and early 90s when the Northwest Forest Plan was being devised. But it would essentially be something like an Endangered Ecosystems Act. That would be one way to frame it. But in a different way President Biden recently issued an executive order in which old growth throughout the entire U.S. would be inventoried. And eventually the National Forest System would create new plans for protecting old growth and mature forest, explicitly – those are the kinds of things we get excited about. One concern, of course, about executive orders is they can be overturned by future presidents. So the idea is having something with the same force as the Endangered Species Act, but looking at broader systems and not just the individual species.

Miller: How much do you feel that people in your position are listened to when public policy is made?

Odenbaugh: Well, you know, one of the really wonderful experiences in writing an editorial for The New York Times is seeing all the comments. Sometimes people joke, “Don’t read the comments!” But we did. And it was really wonderful to see people who felt passionate feelings about both people here in the Pacific Northwest, the people outside on both sides of the issue. We got emails from biologists who were interested in what we wrote and sometimes disagreed.

So I think as a philosopher, one of the things I really love is to get my hands dirty and work on really concrete issues. I’ve lived in Oregon for 21 years and this is an issue I deeply care about. So insofar as we can help people think critically and engage democratically in these issues, we’re that much happier.

Miller: Jay Odenbaugh, thanks very much.

Odenbaugh: Thank you so much.

Miller: Jay Odenbaugh is the James F. Miller Professor of Humanities at Lewis & Clark College. He wrote a recent op-ed in The New York Times with the Portland State philosopher Avram Hiller and the Oregon Tech philosopher Yasha Rohwer. They wrote that the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service’s plan to kill barred owls to save spotted owls is ethically problematic.

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