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This qualitative case study examines the nature of the competing information campaigns offered by environmental and timber industry groups as they conflict over the Northern spotted owl and 'old growth' forests in the Pacific Northwest. Environmental advocacy literature is reviewed and background of the debate is provided. The competing information campaigns are shown to comprise a synchronous, spiral-like logic of interaction in which antagonists mirror or match each other's rhetorical and communicative strategies. The study suggests that even in the absence of direct communication between disputants, the opposing political information campaigns are co-created within a system characterized by necessity and constraint.

This essay examines the spotted owl controversy as a public argument rooted in conflicting owl synecdoches that conceptualize competing social realities for environmentalists and the timber industry. It argues that these conceptions not only represent conflicting realities of the old-growth forest, but also function as 'figurative' or 'representational ideographs' that disallow resolution and maintain conflict because the controversy is too significant to resolve. By applying Burke's view of synecdoche and extending McGee's concept of the ideograph to conflicting views expressed in synecdochal form, the essay offers a unique perspective for understanding how controversies are influenced by rhetorical tropes and how such tropes prevent resolution and maintain controversy by becoming issues in and of themselves.