In the name of saving the spotted owl, environmentalists succeeded in shutting down logging in an area of the Pacific Northwest the size of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont and Connecticut combined. The logging industry has lost billions of dollars and loggers have lost tens of thousands of jobs.

Several myths dominate the rhetoric of misguided environmentalism in this controversy and others.

Myth: Nature would be in stable, self-regulating equilibrium but for the actions of human beings. Far from remaining stable, national parks when left alone have become overpopulated with elk, moose and deer. They destroy the willows and aspen that sustain a host of creatures including beavers and grizzly bears.

Myth: Logging is a threat to the ecosystem of the Pacific Northwest. There is nothing natural or beneficial about trees living for hundreds of years. As the canopy gets thicker, plant and animal life die out on the ground below. Major disturbances, usually fire, are nature's way of rejuvenating the life cycle of a forest. In the modern era, where we actively suppress fires, logging replaces the benefits of fire and contributes to the health of forests.

Myth: Logging is a threat to the spotted owl. The spotted owl did not become an issue because radical environmentalists actually cared about the bird. Instead, they wanted to stop logging and they needed for political reasons a "charismatic" creature - one the public would find cute and cuddly, as opposed to a minnow like the snail darter. Spotted owls, it turns out, are not endangered after all. Moreover, owls seem to do better in forests that have been logged and regenerated than in forests whose trees are 200 years old and older - the ones environmentalists want to declare off limits.

Myth: Old growth forests of the Northwest today are only 10 percent of their size at the time the white settlers arrived. There is more forestland today and more old growth in the Northwest than at the time of Columbus. One reason is that native Americans engaged in extensive burning - to assist in hunting as well as forest management.

Source: Alston Chase, In a Dark Wood (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1995).