ms or other habitat.
Recently, Jim Lyons, assistant secretary of agriculture, presented the Administration's latest forest plan for the Northwest for the approval in the federal court, which for years has blocked logging to protect the spotted owl's habitat. That plan would allow logging to resume at levels far below those of the 1980s.
In another victory for environmentalists over the logging industry, in the spring of 1994 the agency canceled a long-term contract with an Alaskan timber company to log in the Tongass National Forest. This reversed decades of preferential treatment for Alaska Pulp Corporation. Its 50 year contract with the government had provided the company with low-cost timber from the nation's last largely intact rain forest.
In 1990, the spotted owl was listed as a species threatened with extinction. Until that time, logging had decimated nearly 90 percent of the old-growth forests in the United States. These are forests that have been undisturbed for at least 200 years. In May 1991, U.S. District Court Judge William Dwyer ordered a stop to logging in the old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwest until the U.S. Forest Service, responsible for managing about 23 million acres of such land, had a sc
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