The Smokey Wire : National Forest News and Views

To continue with this blog’s exploration of “Agenda-Based Science,” here’s a Throwback Thursday edition that looks at Julie McDonald, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Interior Department during the George W. Bush years.

Between 2004 and 2010, the Union of Concerned Scientists published a series of case studies as part of their “Scientific Integrity Program.” All the case studies are certainly worthy of a look in and of themselves.

Their article, “Political Appointee Edits Science on Greater Sage Grouse” focuses on just some of the underhanded tactics used by Ms. MacDonald.

MacDonald didn’t just edit and interfere with the science surrounded Sage Grouse. She also was deeply involved with similar questionable deeds regarding bull trout.

And the list went on to include Canada lynx, Preble’s meadow jumping mouse and California red-legged frog.

Ms. MacDonald’s exposed attempts to ride roughshod over numerous decisions by agency scientists concerning endangered species protections is very much directly related to a sizable number of discussions and debates we’ve had on this blog over the federal timber sale program and litigation by some environmental groups in Montana, especially since much of the litigation has at least some focus on bull trout and Canada lynx.

While it’s ‘fun’ for some folks on this blog to point fingers at groups like the Alliance for the Wild Rockies or Swan View Coalition, could it be that without Ms. MacDonald’s meddling with agency scientists around 15 years ago we’d be in a different place today?

Finally, right after Julie MacDonald was forced to resign in May 2007, after a scathing report from the Interior Department’s Inspector General, the scientific journal “Nature: the International Journal of Science” published this piece titled “Disgraced official was paid work bonus: Irregularities highlight political interference in Endangered Species Act.”

SNIP: “Further troubling reports have surfaced in the case of a disgraced US official accused of political interference in the workings of the Endangered Species Act. It has been disclosed that Julie MacDonald, former deputy assistant secretary for fish, wildlife and parks at the Department of the Interior (DOI), received a performance award of nearly $10,000 in 2005. Yet the report of an investigation into her conduct, released on 27 March this year (2007), reveals that MacDonald violated federal regulations while in that position.”

Let’s add this one to the discussion and debate about “Agenda-driven science.”

In an attempt to reduce litigation costs, Georgia-Pacific – “one of the world’s leading makers of tissue, pulp, packaging, building products and related chemicals” according to GP’s official website – launched a secret campaign to produce and publish counterfeit science designed to raise doubts about the dangers of asbestos. You can read the full story here.

According to The Union of Concerned Scientists: “beginning in 2005, Georgia-Pacific crafted and published counterfeit science — seeding the literature with articles intended to raise doubts about the dangers posed by asbestos. In so doing, the company created a life-threatening hazard by deceiving those who rely on science to understand the health risks of asbestos exposure.”

Again, you can read the full story here.

For whatever it’s worth:

The Union of Concerned Scientists is a national nonprofit organization founded 50 years ago by scientists and students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who sought to use the power of science to address global problems and improve people’s lives.

Our Mission
The Union of Concerned Scientists puts rigorous, independent science to work to solve our planet’s most pressing problems. Joining with people across the country, we combine technical analysis and effective advocacy to create innovative, practical solutions for a healthy, safe, and sustainable future.

Here’s today’s press release from WildEarth Guardians, Western Watersheds Project and the Western Environmental Law Center.

MISSOULA, Mont. — Two conservation groups, WildEarth Guardians and Western Watersheds Project, have filed a federal lawsuit challenging the U.S. Forest Service’s revised Forest Plan for Montana’s Flathead National Forest. The groups also put the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on notice of their intent to challenge the agency’s finding that the Flathead’s revised plan is not likely to jeopardize the continued existence of grizzly bears, Canada lynx, and bull trout—all listed species under the Endangered Species Act—and adversely affect designated critical habitat of Canada lynx and bull trout.

“The Flathead is one of the last places in the Lower 48 where one can see grizzly bears, wolverines, lynx, and wolves intermingling on the same landscape,” said Kelly Nokes, wildlife attorney for the Western Environmental Law Center, which is representing the two conservation groups in the lawsuit. “We must hold the Forest Service accountable to ensure that the increasingly rare habitat security afforded by the Flathead’s intact ecosystems is not swallowed whole by a management plan unwilling to truly conserve.”

The Flathead’s revised Forest Plan is woefully inadequate and will have lasting negative impacts on key wildlife—including, grizzly bears, gray wolves, Canada lynx, wolverine and bull trout—and the critical habitats upon which they depend. The Flathead National Forest, which borders Glacier National Park, contains some of the most intact wildlands and free flowing rivers on the entire continent, and is a refuge for a variety of imperiled species.

“The revised Forest Plan will guide all future forest activities—including logging, road building, and grazing—for at least the next 15 years and likely much longer. It is crucial the Forest Service gets this plan right,” said Marla Fox, Staff Attorney for WildEarth Guardians. “The best available science supports the notion that the Forest Service can do more to protect imperiled wildlife. The continued struggle of grizzly bear and bull trout to survive on the Flathead signal the agency should do more.”

“The Crown of the Continent is one of North America’s most valuable, intact ecosystems and is a centerpiece for grizzly bear conservation in the Northern Rockies,” said Josh Osher, Montana Director for Western Watersheds Project. “The Flathead National Forest is the western anchor of this ecosystem, and a key linkage for grizzly connectivity to other suitable habitats. But instead of prioritizing wildlife habitats, the Flathead Forest Plan prioritizes the activities that destroy and fragment habitats and disturb sensitive wildlife.”

Notably, the Flathead’s plan is one of the first Forest Plan revisions finalized under new forest planning rules issued in 2012 by the U.S. Forest Service. Thus, it will serve as a model for all future planning processes on other National Forests.

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The key criterion for identifying potential wilderness is an area that “generally appears to have been affected primarily by the forces of nature, with the imprint of man’s work substantially unnoticeable” (Planning Handbook Ch. 70).  A new report from the Friends of the Clearwater alleges that the Forest Service is degrading the wilderness potential of existing roadless areas over time by logging them, using exceptions provided by the regulations governing management of roadless areas, such as reducing fire risk.

Since 2008, “Across Idaho, the Forest Service reported roadless logging in preliminary numbers ranging up to 18,000 acres of roadless areas.”  In Montana, “The Forest Service disclosed preliminary figures, enumerating that it authorized approximately 33,000 acres of roadless logging from 2010 to 2018.”

Also according to the report:

“When the Forest Service revises forest plans, we found a pattern where the agency drops isolated acreage from its roadless inventory and wilderness-recommendation process due to evidence of timber harvest. The Forest Service Handbook directs the agency to identify a basic potential-wilderness inventory; the agency can include areas where logging has occurred if improvements are not substantially noticeable. The Forest Service will also use this criterion to update its roadless inventory. In two different forest plans, the Forest Service dropped the roadless acres where timber harvest had occurred because at the time of review, those portions of roadless areas did not meet the criteria for potential wilderness or espoused roadless characteristics.”

This article includes a link to the report, and includes an example of a project that has led to recent litigation.

Utah is attempting a more direct approach:  modifying the regulations governing roadless areas for their state, including eliminating protections for some areas.  While road construction is generally not allowed in roadless areas under the existing regulations, Utah would like more roads to reduce fire risk, a contention countered here.

Today’s opinion page of the New York Times includes this piece by Timothy Egan. Highlights from Egan’s column are printed below. Here’s some background on Egan, an award winning writer and author who has won both a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize:

Timothy Egan worked for 18 years as a writer for The New York Times, first as the Pacific Northwest correspondent, then as a national enterprise reporter.

In 2006, Mr. Egan won the National Book Award for his history of people who lived through the Dust Bowl, “The Worst Hard Time.” The book also became a New York Times best seller.

In 2001, he won the Pulitzer Prize as part of a team of reporters who wrote the series “How Race Is Lived in America.” He has done special projects on the West and the decline of rural America, and he has followed the entire length of the Lewis and Clark Trail.

Mr. Egan is the author of five books, including “The Good Rain: Across Time and Terrain in the Pacific Northwest,” and “Lasso the Wind, Away to the New West.” He lives in Seattle. Mr. Egan’s column appears every Friday.

Almost 25 percent of American earth-warming emissions originate from industrial action involving public land or offshore leases.

The United States is the biggest carbon polluter in history, and now ranks behind only China in greenhouse gas emissions. As well, we’re now the largest crude oil producer in the world. And we’ve become a leading exporter of that oil, just to show how bad of a global citizen we can be.

If you force the Trump administration to stop bingeing on public land, you can make an immediate impact on the amount of earth-warming carbon the United States spits into the atmosphere….

Another big step is to prevent David Bernhardt, a former oil and gas lobbyist, from becoming interior secretary. A stooge for his former clients, this Trump nominee was the deputy secretary, while the top job was held by a strange man, Ryan Zinke, who paraded around on a horse named Tonto.

It was Bernhardt who tried to block release of a federal analysis showing that two widely used pesticides were so toxic that they ‘jeopardize the continued existence‘ of more than 1,200 species of birds, fish and other life-forms without lobbyists, as my colleague Eric Lipton reported this week.

You can see who Bernhardt is working for: It’s not all the living things under the domain of the emperor of the outdoors. Nor is he looking out for the interests of children, who will have to live with the consequences of action taken by adults in service to carbon pollution.

About those kids: Senator Mike Lee of Utah recently took to the floor of his chamber to say that the best response to the mounting chaos of epic floods, searing wildfires and other symptoms of a sick earth is to get married and have children.

What he didn’t say was that we hold our public land in trust for the Americans of tomorrow. The least we can do is stop using it to imperil their world.

A recent article in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, a journal of the Ecological Society of America, will be of interest to members of this blog. It’ll probably be controversial, too. I urge anyone expressing opinions, pro or con, to stick to factual, constructive criticism, and to avoid attacks of a personal nature on anyone involved, just as the authors seem to have done.

The article is: “The conundrum of agenda-driven science in conservation,” by M Zachariah Peery and eight other authors. The full text of this and a companion article is here:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/331453208_The_conundrum_of_agenda-driven_science_in_conservation

The authors write that, “At this time, we believe advocacy by scientists is essential for environmental conservation and, indeed, humanity. It is difficult to envision the state of our environment had scientists failed to encourage policy makers and the public to address emerging conservation problems. Nevertheless, conservation scientists must avoid misusing the scientific process to promote specific conservation outcomes (Wilholt 2009); doing so erodes the credibility of science and can produce undesirable consequences (Thomas 1992; Mills 2000; Rohr and McCoy 2010). We consider intentionally engaging in activities outside of professional norms to promote desired outcomes, as part of either the production or dissemination of science, to constitute “agenda-driven science”. The issue of advocacy-related bias in conservation science merits renewed discussion because conservation conflicts in an increasingly polarized world might tempt some to engage in agenda-driven science to “win” a conflict (Redpath et al. 2015; Kareiva et al. 2018).”

In the companion article, “Agenda-driven science? The case of spotted owls and fire,” the authors use “Several studies from one research group (Lee, Bond, and Hanson)” – referred to as LBH – as a case study. LBH are Derek E. Lee, Monica Bond, and Chad Hanson. Hanson has been mentioned in numerous posts here; he is coauthor (with Dominick A. DellaSala), of The Ecological Importance of Mixed-Severity Fires: Nature’s Phoenix, and numerous articles and essays. Bond and Lee are frequent coauthors with Hansen.

The authors of “Agenda-driven science?” write:

“Certainly, advocacy in support of these positions could, in some cases, be justified because fuels treatments and salvage logging have the potential to be detrimental to owl habitat and forest ecosystems, respectively (Lindenmayer and Noss 2006; Ganey et al. 2017).”

So far, so good.

“However, as detailed below, it is our opinion that LBH appear to have engaged in six activities outside of professional norms in support of their advocacy that promote a narrative that high-severity wildfire does not threaten spotted owls. These apparent activities include: (i) mixing science and litigation without disclosing potential conflicts of interest; (ii) using social media (rather than peer-reviewed journals) to conduct critical scientific reviews of studies that do not support the findings of their own work; (iii) pressuring scientists and graduate students with different research findings to retract their papers or not publish their thesis findings; (iv) conducting erroneous analyses using data they did not collect and with which they were unfamiliar; (v) selectively using data that support their agendas; and (vi) making management recommendations beyond what is reasonably supported by scientific findings. Individually, we consider each of these activities to fall outside of scientific norms. Collectively, however, they may be symptomatic of agenda-driven science involving attempts to understate uncertainty and promote a narrative not fully supported by the scientific literature that aims to influence forest management.”

These weighty accusations are well documented in the peer-reviewed “Agenda-driven science?” article.

Questions for discussion:

1. Is this an unusual or perhaps unprecedented evaluation of a body of work (by LBH)?

2. Is it fair, valid criticism?

3. Are there other examples of authors whose “activities outside of professional norms” in natural resources subject areas?

4. What is to be done, if anything, when agenda-driven science crosses the line between advocacy and “activities outside of professional norms” of advocacy?

I’ve written about the “Rolodex factor” before, acknowledging that the Rolodex is outdated technology.  I’ve also done a great deal of reading about the difficulties facing journalism these days.  One of our goals at The Smokey Wire is to help journalists get the best unbiased information possible. This is not because any of us are unbiased, but rather, in discussing our different points of view, people get to read both sides in a fair manner.

Given all that, let’s explore the groups who are on journalists’ virtual Rolodexes, and find out more about them.  One curiosity in this Administration is why the Interior Secretary tends to be such a target, while the Agriculture Secretary and the Forest Service (much) less so. Tomorrow is the hearing on the nomination of David Bernhardt to be Secretary of the Interior. Interior seems to attract its own well-funded environmental groups which got started in the past decade (before Trump), funded by the New Venture Fund and pretty much focused on oil and gas development.

Here’s a story in Colorado Politics:

Some environmentalists continued their criticism of Bernhardt leading up to Thursday’s confirmation hearing.
Chris Saeger, executive director of the Montana-based Western Values Project, said, “He’s spent the past two years at Interior doing the bidding of corporate lobbyists and special interests, and we can expect that to continue should he be confirmed as Interior secretary.”

The Western Values Project, an advocacy organization for protecting public lands, previously sued the Interior Department to obtain documents about Bernhardt’s tenure as solicitor for the Interior Department.

What do we know about the “Western Values Project”? It is linked to the New Venture Fund. Dave Skinner has written about this here in the Flathead Beacon, and we discussed it here. Dave also mentions “multiple “six-figure” advertising buys by WVP in multiple states the past few years.”

There’s an E&E story from January that says while it for transparency, it is not necessarily transparent itself. This whole E&E story is well worth reading:

Saeger, O’Neill and the rest of WVP’s staff are among the fund’s approximately 450 employees. They file time sheets to help New Venture ensure that the organization as a whole isn’t spending too much time engaging in lobbying and to keep track of how much time its project employees are spending on each of their projects’ activities.

“Maybe they have grants from different donors that are for different purposes and they’re required by the donors to track the time,” Bodner said.

Back in Montana, Saeger emphasized that donor secrecy is a strategic decision the group has made to protect benefactors from the blowback its work can trigger in today’s highly politicized culture. He also dismissed concerns that WVP could be seen as doing the bidding of companies like Patagonia.

“Our work really speaks for itself from that point of view,” he said. “We operate in a very fact-driven way and present reporters more with raw information to construct a story [rather] than trying to do something that’s geared towards creating an individual winner in the marketplace.”

Massoglia, however, believes WVP could have a bigger impact if the public knew who was ultimately behind the group’s efforts.

“No matter what message you’re trying to deliver, it’s important to do things the right way — in a transparent way — so that donors see how their funds are used and people know who’s funding certain messages,” the nonprofits researcher said. That’s especially true, she said, “with messages that are trying to influence policies.”

“It’s hypocritical to promote transparency as an organization and not have transparency about your finances,” Massoglia added. “It really doesn’t show that they practice what they preach.”