CHURCHVILLE, VA In a betrayal of public trust, a group of federal and state wildlife biologists recently tried to bar the public from two national parks by faking evidence that the parks were inhabited by a threatened wildcat species, the Canada lynx.
Three Forest Service employees, two U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service officials and two employees of the Washington State Department of Fish and Wildlife admittedly put faked samples of Canadian lynx hair on “rubbing posts,†used to detect the presence of lynx, in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest and the Wenatchee National Forest in Washington State. DNA tests show the hair actually came from a lynx living in a nature preserve and another escaped pet lynx that was held briefly by federal officials until the owner retrieved it.
Another Forest Service employee eventually revealed the hoax. Otherwise, the Forest Service might have further restricted logging, tree thinning and many public recreation activities in the two forests, all under the authority of the Endangered Species Act.
The biologists involved in the hoax now claim they were simply trying to test the ability of government laboratories to analyze DNA samples. “That would be like bank robbers taking money from a bank and saying they were just testing the bank’s security,†said Rob Gordon of the National Wilderness Institute. Gorden warned that if the allegations are true, they “reveal an unscientific and heavily politicized application of the Endangered Species Act.â€
Retired Fish and Wildlife Service biologist James M. Beers said the false sampling was no surprise to him. “I’m convinced that there is a lot of that going on for so-called higher purposes,†he said.
The names of the offending public employees have not been revealed—for “privacy†reasons according to a Forest Service spokesman in Washington, D.C. They have received “counseling,†and been forbidden to work on a national lynx habitat survey that is still under way.
However, Western Congressmen and Senators are threatening oversight hearings on the incident. Jim Buck a Washington State Representative, is calling for the firing of the two state employees involved. “We have watched friends lose their homes and property because of the ESA in the name of species preservation. Then to have something like this come up—people are hopping up and down mad,†Buck said.
The government biologists apparently climbed onto a bandwagon that’s all too popular with environmental activists. It started with the Tellico Dam, which was being built in Tennessee in the 1970s. Activists claimed that the dam site was the only habitat in the world for a tiny fish called the snail darter. By the time the dam was built—after years of delay—snail darters had been found in a large number of other locations.
In the 1990s, the federal government put much of the nation’s Northwest national forests off-limits to logging, supposedly to protect the northern spotted owl. Activists said the owls were becoming rare because the old growth forests in which they nested were being cut down. In reality, the owls were rare in the old growth forests because there weren’t many rodents living under the big trees. (Historically, spotted owls nested in old growth, and hunted in the nearby new growth created by frequent forest fires.)
America’s publicly owned parks and forests are a wonderful national asset. However, they belong to all the people, not just to the few “deep ecologists†who want all human activity barred from their boundaries. Hiking, camping, fishing, birdwatching—even hunting and snowmobiling—are legitimate recreational activities in appropriate places.
There’s no question that we now worry more about wildlife conservation than timber production. That’s even a legitimate concern—but the conservation must be global in scope. After the “spotted owl reduction†in U.S. logging (on what had been some of the most productive and sustainable forests in the world) Asia began buying more of its timber from tropical forests in Indonesia and Myanmar. We protected spotted owls that weren’t really endangered, at the cost of endangering many tropical wildlife species.
It is famously hard to fire government employees. Let’s understand, however, that this government-sponsored hoax could have cost hundreds of thousands of us our recreation opportunities. It could have cost the jobs of thousands of other people—loggers, furniture makers, Old Town canoe craftsmen, mountain-bike salesmen and the employees of outdoor-equipment firms like L.L. Bean.
Conservation is not a legitimate excuse for any government employee to betray the public’s trust.
Will the biologists who perpetrated this hoax even get an official public reprimand?
We will keep you posted, but don’t expect to hear about it on the 6 o’clock news.
This article was published by Knight Ridder Tribune
Dennis T. Avery is based in Churchville, Va., and is director of global food issues for the Hudson Institute of Indianapolis.
