Our Klamath Basin Water Crisis
Upholding rural Americans' rights to grow food,
own property, and caretake our wildlife and natural resources.
Our Klamath Basin
Water Crisis
Upholding rural Americans' rights to grow food,
own property, and caretake our wildlife and natural resources.
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One casualty of the wildlife wars http://www.oregonlive.com/editorials/oregonian/index.ssf?/base/editorial/106405948721820.xml One casualty of the wildlife wars 09/20/03 It's disturbing to see the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service concede it lacks the credibility, the resources, or both, to determine alone whether two bird species that drove logging shutdowns in the Northwest should keep their federal protections. The agency's Portland office is hiring a private business to help decide whether the spotted owl and marbled murrelet still require protections under the federal Endangered Species Act. The agency has never before turned such reviews over to anyone else. The real significance of this change is not that some private scientists will now assess the health of spotted owls and murrelets, and draw conclusions about the health and outlook of the species. After all, there are lots of able private biologists, and Fish and Wildlife biologists will review the work and be responsible for the final recommendations on species protections. What really matters is the message it sends about the dented reputation of the nation's premier fish and wildlife agency. The Fish and Wildlife Service is showing the effects of a beating it has taken for controversial orders that led to a near-shutdown of public-forest logging and a farm crisis in the Klamath Basin. The agency came in for withering criticism, even from the highest levels of the Bush administration, for its orders to protect suckers in Klamath Lake. Industry groups aren't the only ones responsible for undercutting the credibility of government scientists. Environmentalists have so frequently attacked the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management that the public no longer believes those agencies, and their scientists, are consistently doing the right thing for fish, wildlife and other natural resources. Now we're seeing one distressing result of all that criticism -- an expert fish and wildlife agency no longer widely considered a fair and unbiased arbiter of natural resource policies. A spokeswoman admitted the agency was farming out the owl and murrelet review "to avoid any sort of impression that this was anything but an objective, unbiased review." Maybe the service will find a private business that everyone in the spotted owl debate can trust and believe in, but somehow we doubt that. More likely, this decision will just shift the rampant suspicion and inevitable claims of bias from a government agency to the private contractor. The Bush administration is properly demanding that agencies now conduct "scientifically rigorous peer review" for studies or assessments that lead to major decisions with large economic impacts. The spotted owl review, which will center on whether the birds truly require the large areas of old-growth forests now set aside for them, seems to fit that definition. However, the ultimate answer to the Northwest wildlife wars is not to keep using government scientists as whipping boys, turn them into contract administrators or spend tax dollars on studies by private businesses. In the end, the only real solution is to rebuild the respected, independent government agencies charged with managing and protecting this nation's fish and wildlife. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ NOTE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, any copyrighted material herein is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes only. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml |
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