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Dear Guardian,
There is a time for conflict and a time for collaboration, and often collaboration can work at its best when born from conflict.
Today’s agreement between WildEarth Guardians, the U.S. Forest Service, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was born out of conflict—an injunction on tree cutting and a court order issued in September 2019 that stemmed from a lawsuit we filed in 2013, over the agencies’ decades-long failure to monitor Mexican spotted owl populations and ensure their recovery across the Southwest.
But this conflict goes back even farther, to more than 25 years ago, when Guardians was founded to halt logging of ancient forests to protect the threatened Mexican spotted owl in the Southwest. Though we are a larger and more sophisticated organization today, we’re no less passionate about the Mexican spotted owl and southwestern national forests. And we now hope that this agreement will put the Mexican spotted owl on the path to recovery.
Today’s agreement requires the Forest Service to comply with the requirements of the 2012 Mexican Spotted Owl Recovery Plan, and obliges the agency to, among other things:
- Conduct annual, range-wide owl population trend monitoring;
- Survey for owls prior to ground-disturbing activities and protect those areas where owls are found;
- Analyze and track long-term trends in the owl’s habitat;
- Assess the effects of timber management activities such as logging, thinning, and prescribed burning on the owls and their habitat, and use the monitoring data and assessments, along with up-to-date scientific studies, to inform, constrain, and modify ongoing and future timber management;
- Create a Mexican Spotted Owl Leadership Forum and working teams for each owl management area, which provide opportunities for state and federal agencies, scientists, NGOs, and the public to meet regularly to discuss the science, monitoring results, and owl management and recovery, and facilitate coordination and communication of recovery efforts.
The historic agreement applies to all 11 national forests in Arizona and New Mexico, which cover over 20 million acres. While the injunction on timber management activities will be lifted, the agreement creates a new framework for the Forest Service to better manage spotted owls and their habitat. And, as a result of working closely together to come to this agreement, Guardians and the agencies have forged an effective working relationship and a new model for collaboration.
This agreement’s greatest significance is that it brings citizen advocacy, science, and the law together in the way that the framers of environmental laws, such as the Endangered Species Act and the National Environmental Policy Act, intended. This is democracy in action and exemplifies a fundamental principle of environmental law and public lands—that the public plays a critical role in upholding the law. Without this foundational safety net, which is currently under attack by the Trump administration, national forests would be less wild and beautiful, and Mexican spotted owls might be pushed to the brink of extinction.
Guardians will continue to work within this democratic framework to defend and uphold our bedrock environmental laws and protect and restore wild places, wildlife, wild river, and public health and safety from agency mismanagement and extractive uses. We look forward to working closely with the Forest Service to ensure that this settlement agreement is implemented and provides a path to recovery for the Mexican spotted owl and the majestic southwestern landscape they, and we, call home.
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