Scientists, judges, and spotted owls: Policymakers in the Pacific Northwest

In 1993, President Bill Clinton placed more than 24 million acres of federal lands in Washington, Oregon, and Northern California under ecosystem management, seeking to protect old growth forests and over 1000 species associated with them. This policy shift also reduced federal timber sales by more than 75 percent, adversely affecting about 300 rural communities. The President was acting on the advice of a scientific committee that he had appointed to develop a new plan for managing federal lands in the Pacific Northwest. The Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund had alleged and federal judges had agreed that federal land and wildlife managers were not doing enough to protect the Northern Spotted Owl, violating the National Environmental Policy Act, the National Forest Management Act, and the Endangered Species Act. District Judge William Dwyer went further than this, however, reading these laws to require management of "biological communities" or ecosystems rather than individual species. Judicial rulings in the owl cases frequently relied on the testimony and affidavits of federal and university scientists. This dissertation analyzes the vital role scientists and judges played in this significant policy shift, showing (1) how scientific communities are constituted and nature constructed through processes of "boundary-work" relying on "pollution" and "purity" claims; (2) the cultural conditions under which non-scientists will get involved in this political struggle for scientific authority; (3) the types of policy-advocacy or discourse coalitions that will arise and be successful under these cultural conditions, and (4) and how the foregoing factors explain the rise of ecosystem management, here re-framed as the institutionalization of an egalitarian construct of nature.