colonialist owls

This is a fascinating report: “Very soon, the federal government may authorize the killing of nearly a half-million barred owls in the Pacific Northwest in a desperate bid to save the northern spotted owl.” The argument appended to the report is that this proposal is unwise.

The key passage, I think, is this:

Many philosophers, conservation biologists and ecologists are skeptical of the idea that we should restore current environments to so-called historical base lines, as this plan tries to do. In North America, the preferred base line for conservation is usually just before the arrival of Europeans. (In Western forests, this is often pegged to 1850, when significant logging began.) But life has existed on Earth for 3.7 billion years. Any point we choose as the “correct” base line will either be arbitrary or in need of a strong defense.

The authors don’t say this explicitly, but it seems clear that the federal campaign against the barred owl depends on a reading of human political history. The movement of the barred owl westward is analogized to the movement of Europeans into the North American continent and across it.

Without that history in mind, the increasing dominance of the barred owl over the spotted owl would be just One of Those Things that happens in nature. But by using human political history to interpret such events, the government teaches itself to see barred owls as “invasive” — like they’re on the Oregon Trail or something.

It’s silly, but it’s also one of the subtler forms that the politicization of science takes.