James Hrynyshyn is a freelance science journalist based in western North Carolina, where he tries to put degrees in marine biology and journalism to good use.
It's been a bad week for the US Interior Department, and it's only Tuesday. First a deputy assistant secretary resigned after her habit of passing endangered species information to private groups was exposed for all to see. Then more than three dozen scientists signed a letter condemning the Bush administration's interpretation of the Endangered Species Act. That would make it a good week for endangered species, though.
Julie MacDonald's resignation came a week before the beginning of a series of House committee hearings on political interference with biologists. Seems an inspector general's report didn't make her look all that reputable. According to the New York Times' Felicity Barringer:
Among other actions that drew the ire of wildlife biologists and lawyers, Ms. MacDonald had heavily edited biologists' reports on sage grouse, a species that in the end was not placed on the threatened or endangered lists. Their habitat overlaps with vast parts of the Rocky Mountain West, where oil and gas drilling and cattle ranching are prevalent; listing the grouse as endangered or threatened could have curbed those industries' access to federal lands.But political interference in science is nothing new for this administration, so why is MacDonald resigning when so many of her colleagues elsewhere in government are hanging tough? Probably because when she leaked sensitive documents she ventured over a line that only Karl Rove and Dick Cheney get to cross:In another case in the inspector general's report, Ms. MacDonald demanded that scientists reduce the nesting range for the Southwest willow flycatcher to a radius of 1.8 miles, from a 2.1-miles, so it would not cross into California, where her husband has a ranch.
Last week, lawyers in Portland, Ore., for the environmental group, Earthjustice, discovered that a timber lobbying group, the American Forest Resource Council, had based part of its March 7 lawsuit against the Interior Department on an internal draft of endangered-species regulations, not on the rules actually in force.As for the letter calling the Bushies on the floor for not doing enough to save endangered species, what took them so long?Chris West, a spokesman for the timber group, said the erroneous citation was being changed. Mr. West did not immediately respond to e-mail asking how the lobbyists had gained access to a preliminary working document. The draft would make it easier to remove endangered-species protections that had already been granted to animals and plants.
The proposed changes would "have real and profoundly detrimental impacts on the conservation of many species and the habitat upon which they depend," said the letter, signed by 38 prominent wildlife biologists and environmental ethics specialists.The government, for its part, said "no it wouldn't." Interior Department spokesman Hugh Vickery called that idea "complete nonsense."The scientists wrote that the proposal would have allowed the bald eagle to become extinct in the lower 48 states.
So who you going to believe? The letter's signatories include Edward O. Wilson, Pellegrino Research Professor in Entomology, Harvard University; Gus Speth, dean of Yale University's School of Forestry and Environmental Studies; Stuart Pimm, the Doris Duke Professor of Conservation Biology at Duke University; Michael Soulé, professor emeritus of environmental studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz; Reed Noss, president of the North American Section of the Society for Conservation Biology; and Phil Hedrick, Ullman Professor of Biology at Arizona State University. Commie pinkos all, I'm sure.
