Lecture #3

          Last Thursday, September 27th, I attended the lecture seminar over forest management. It was called "Beyond Spotted Owls and Logging: Forest and Ecosystem Management. It was put on in the Great Hall of the MU by Jerry Franklin. Franklin was a leader of Forest Management in the U.S. He put on the FEMAT which is the Forest Ecosystem Management Assessment Test.
          His main talk was over the Spotted Owls Controversy. Spotted Owls are native to North American but we can't garentee that for long said Jerry. They are near threatened and their population is dramatically decreasing. They are trying to create somewhat of a comeback for this population under the ESA which is the Endangered Species Act. What they are doing in the long run is trying to create logging for this specific species. So far they are up to 1700 acres of strickly forest logging. This is a serious problem because they are dramatically dropping in population. Statistically they are dropping by nearly 50 percent annually.
          Jerry has done a lot of work dealing with the ecosystem management and loggin in America. He did 14 years of Forest Service Research in the Pacific North West Ecosystem, two years as director of the National Science Foundation, and 14 years as Chief Plant Ecologist in Pacific West studies programs. He stated "Ecosystem Management is the main service to conserve the ecosystem and to restore Natural Resources back to their original state".  The main objective of the ESA ( Endangered Species Act ) is to effectively maintain the ethical use of natural resources such as coal, oil (petroleum), and wood. The wood is a main thing that brought on the topic of forest and ecosystem management. Not only is the spotted owls controversy such a big deal, but more and more forest animals are losing their honest to deforestation and if this isn't solved soon, many of these species will be going extinct.