THE WAR ON ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENTISTS

A campaign of stifling attacks on the essence of scientific truth is thriving both within the ranks of the United States' largest employer, the federal government, and among natural resource agencies in most of the nation's 50 states.

By Todd Wilkinson

April 1999

In 10 years of tracking grizzly bears across Yellowstone National Park, biologist David Mattson grew accustomed to the remains of backcountry cabins that had been ransacked by powerful bruins - stout doors pried from their hinges; floor planks splintered; window glass strewn across the floor; the contents of cabinets plundered by the forearms of 600-pound ursids.

But for the nation's premier expert on Yellowstone grizzly bear ecology, the bone-chilling sensation of invasion, violence, and trauma meeting him on the stoops of wilderness cabins was nothing compared to the jolt he received when he arrived for work at his office one cold winter morning.

Mattson discovered that someone had rifled through his personal files at the headquarters of the federal Yellowstone Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team in Bozeman, Montana - the nerve centre for bear research in one of America's largest and last wild ecosystems. The intruder had seized eight years' worth of field data, deleted key documents from Mattson's computer, and turned his files upside down. The scene, Mattson said, looked as if a grizzly had torn through the premises.

Only later did he learn that the raid was carried out at the direction of his own government superiors, who had decided they did not want Mattson's bleak forecast for the survival of Yellowstone's famous bears to reach the public. David Mattson ultimately was forced out of his job for threatening to blow the whistle on federal policies that, he believes, could doom the grizzly to extinction in the next century.

Mattson's story does not stand alone. Today in the United States, hundreds of other 'combat scientists' are under fire by political forces that have conspired to ensure that their knowledge never sees the light of day. These dissidents carry on a public fight boldly commenced more than 30 years ago by a US Fish and Wildlife Service biologist named Rachel Carson. In 1962, with the completion of her classic book, Silent Spring, Carson alerted the world to the insidious effects of DDT and other harmful biocides.

Carson knew very well that she would be attacked by the chemical industry. Hundreds of thousands of dollars were spent to discredit the book. Carson was described as an ignorant and hysterical woman who wanted to turn the Earth over to the insects.

Although she died before full vindication arrived with the official banning of DDT in 1972, Carson showed generations of women and men that ecologically based science and conservation advocacy were not mutually exclusive. She believed that scientists who fail to act on what the information tells them have no soul.

Meeting Rachel's Children

It was this image that led me to a cavernous meeting hall outside Washington, DC, where a convention of whistleblowers, sponsored by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), became my first formal introduction to the growing army of biologists, earth scientists, and public land managers who have risked their careers to expose threats to our environment.

In street clothes, sans departmental badges and uniforms, Carson's spiritual descendants came from every region of the country. Here were some of the 'jackbooted government thugs' decried by Rush Limbaugh; the people who should be brought down with a rifle shot to the head, according to G Gordon Liddy; the renegades who grew up believing, apparently ignorantly, that it is a virtuous calling to be a natural resource scientist working on behalf of other citizens.

A campaign of stifling attacks on the essence of scientific truth is thriving both within the ranks of the nation's largest employer, the federal government, and among natural resource agencies in most of the 50 states.

Invariably, the pejorative perception of the average whistleblower is of a burned-out, disgruntled, antisocial, trouble-making martyr, castigated as an insubordinate nonconformist, outlaw and snitch. 'Don't listen to the whistleblowers,' a spokesperson for the US Forest Service said. 'They represent the fringe; they're renegades with a bone to pick,' added a public relations specialist at the US Department of the Interior.

As I researched the alleged transgressions of embattled scientists, it became evident that the whistleblowers aren't the ones breaking the laws: They are the heroes who deserve to have their stories told on 60 Minutes.

Had Rachel Carson lived, it is likely that she would be appalled by the current attempts of some elected officials to overturn the ban on DDT, clearcut our remaining forests, suck dry our last wild rivers, play fast and loose with the facts regarding the importance of biological diversity, downplay global warming, and weaken environmental laws that have made the US an international beacon for protection of clean air and water.

Whistleblowing in the Dark

The federal workers inspired by Carson are, right now, at the end of a millennium, trying to create a voice for the last great bears in the northern Rockies, the wilderness caves of southern New Mexico, the giant cedars of Oregon, the last free-flowing rivers in Arizona, the tiny stalks of rare wildflowers in the Appalachians, the frogs of Utah, the tortoises of California's Mojave Desert, and the ancient bull trout of the Northwest. Risking their careers and livelihoods, they have taken on corrupt politicians and bureaucrats wedded to logging and mining companies, industrial polluters, the livestock industry, water developers, and energy conglomerates that have left ecological destruction in their wake.

Whistleblowing is not for the faint of heart; it comes with the inherent risk of self-destruction. The Government Accountability Project (GAP) alone has defended 2,000 whistleblowers against retaliations and firings over the past three decades. One US Justice Department worker suggests that 'suffering through whistleblower retaliation teaches you a lot about your own strengths and weaknesses, about what really matters in life, about who your friends are, and about what human beings are capable of doing to each other in even the most civilised of settings'.

When Howard Wilshire, a distinguished, decorated senior geologist with the US Geological Survey, angered Wise Use movement proponents by documenting the impacts of off-road vehicles on the fragile desert environment of the Mojave, the USGS tried to discredit him and have him fired.

When US Forest Service fisheries biologist Al Espinosa said that overcutting the Clearwater National Forest was eviscerating habitat for half a dozen species of trout and salmon, he was met with racial epithets and intimidation by government managers friendly with the timber industry.

When Utah herpetologist David Ross started compiling a report on the status of rare spotted frogs along the Wasatch Front, the state's entire nongame division, which reviews the status of threatened and endangered species, was eliminated, apparently at the behest of developers.

When EPA pollution specialist Jeff van Ee spoke out on behalf of the imperilled desert tortoise and open space preservation, he found himself threatened with dismissal and jail time.

An Environmental Gulag

'Our natural resource laws are like the old Soviet-bloc constitutions - meant to be genuflected to but not obeyed,' observes High Country News publisher Ed Marston. 'Civil servants who attempt to implement the Endangered Species Act, for example, quickly learn that their agencies exist to subvert the law and its spirit, rather than to follow it.'

Science is not just under repression; the attack is akin to the burning of books that occurred in Nazi Germany. Our elected leaders are marshalling a campaign of ignorance against the American public. The authors of the Contract with America are unabashedly beholden to industry lobbyists who are waging an all-out war to weaken key environmental laws, mobilising to gut the budgets of environmental regulatory agencies, obliterating vanguard agencies such as the National Biological Service that protect the nation's wealth of diverse species, and arranging sweetheart deals with special interest constituencies to ensure that private industry makes a profit at the public's expense.

During his term in the White House, George Bush appointed a 39-member scientific advisory board to identify pressing issues relating to the global environment and human welfare. Conservationists protested that certain biologists were deliberately left off the panel at the behest of Republicans. Nonetheless, in October 1990, the scientists reported overwhelming consensus on four problems that demanded immediate attention: (1) loss of species/biological diversity; (2) loss of species habitats; (3) depletion of the ozone layer; and (4) global warming.

'This wasn't some kind of agenda spearheaded by Beltway liberals,' says Defenders of Wildlife President Rodger Schlickeisen. 'These were credible scientists respected across the board who reached the same conclusion. The only people who tried to refute the findings or claim that we are not in the midst of an environmental crisis were those trained in political science.'

Today, one of the most endangered species in America is the scientific whistleblower. If we as citizens stand idly by and tolerate the repression of government scientists in the public workplace, then where does the repression end? If it can happen here, among people whom we rely upon to tell us the truth about the health of our environment, it can happen anywhere; in our own offices; in our homes and schools.

If anyone has doubts about how pervasive the problem of silencing reformers is, talk to Jim Baca, former director of the Bureau of Land Management, recently elected mayor of Albuquerque, New Mexico. Baca was relieved of his command by Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt for putting science above political science and for declaring that the free lunch was over for miners and ranchers on public lands in the West.

Whistleblower laws have done little to stop agencies from purging scientists who disagree with the findings of their superiors. If you are a government employee and choose to exercise free speech that does not mesh with resource-extraction notions, there is usually a hired-gun politician who will pressure your superiors to have you struck down.

Reagan's Children

There is a clear pattern of quashing dissent that started in earnest with the presidency of Ronald Reagan.

Speaking before the national meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1996, Vice President Al Gore criticised the Republican majority in Congress for scientific suppression. 'Congress is saying we don't know and we don't want to know' about scientific matters, he declared. 'They are approaching science with the wisdom of a potted plant. Most approach science with policies appropriate for Fred Flintstone.'

But no political party has a monopoly on the ability to manipulate science or flout environmental laws for political gain. Even under the Clinton Administration, government scientists have not had the freedom to follow the scientific method.

It's the same old game with new faces, says Andy Stahl, executive director of Oregon-based Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics (FSEEE). 'Speaking out,' Stahl notes, 'is still regarded as traitorous activity. We've progressed little from what are regarded as the repressive years of the 1980s.'

Stahl played an important role in spearheading conservation efforts for the northern spotted owl and salmon that led to major, court-ordered decreases in the volume of timber harvested on national forest lands in the Pacific Northwest. He asserts that the Forest Service and US Fish and Wildlife Service could easily have averted titanic conflicts in the timber-vs.-spotted-owl battle had the agencies listened to their best scientists who had sounded the alarm over habitat destruction years before.

'I look around for evidence that things are changing, and I still see taxpayer-run agencies that resemble the very types of government that we condemned in Eastern Europe during the Cold War,' offers Stahl. 'One wonders: Is it a problem of evil people, or is it one of an evil institutional system? I've seen some of each, but more often than not what I've seen are boring people acting stupidly and ignorantly because of the institutions they work for... In a democracy, a person shouldn't have to worry about losing [their] job for speaking the truth.'

Undoubtedly, Rachel Carson would agree. - Third World Network Features

About the writer: Todd Wilkinson is the author of Science Under Siege: The Politicians' War on Nature and Truth (Johnson Books, Boulder, CO 80301), foreword by David Brower. The above, which is excerpted from that book, first appeared in Earth Island Journal (Fall 1998).

1881/99