No, not all biologists are deep ecologists, but increasing numbers of them are. It is a religion being infused into public schools as a matter of Department of Education policy originating at the UN. Most resource biology and environmental studies departments are now dominated by the philosophy. It is because most such departments are now nearly 50% social scientists (sometimes a majority), and many of them are avowed socialists spouting that very philosophy. Don't believe me, go look. In the not-too-distant future it won't be possible to earn an advanced degree without proper obeiscance to deep ecology. I have watched Bruce Babbit mouth such blather to a roomful of Stanford law students and the lap it up.
Not only does that philosophy dominate universities, it is ubiquitous at the UN and the IUCN. The Earth Charter echoes precisely the central tenets of the philosophy as originally articulated by Mssrs. Naess and Sessions. So, I don't think it quite fits the model of "paranoid theory" as neatly as you intimated. Didn't you?
Oh yes, you did: Perhaps all Muslims are untrustworthy murderers. Perhaps all Christians are unthinking creationists...
Give me a break. If you are going to argue that way, this is the last post I will address to you. You owe me an apology for that kind of crap.
I have personlly investigated false listings of endangered species. I have seen the faked data. I personally know the actors. I have the documentation from the original sources. I have published that documentation. The scientists who produced other papers, falsely cited in the decision to list, have endorsed my book and agreed that both the process and the data were fraudulent.
Is that good enough for you?
So, when I have seen AT LEAST a half-dozen similar fraudulent listings, it starts to develop into a pattern. Upon seeing this case and its flimsy claims to an unsubstantiated interest in scientific rigor, its obvious ideological and professional motives to commit such a fraud (a profit interest), the manner in which it fits the pattern of similar actions elsewhere, the lack of a professional alternative for these employees, and the prior record of the individuals involved and their associations, then the predisposition in the conclusion and the burden of proof starts to shift.
Now, consider how hard it is to get a story like this one publicized and that the USFS is both conducting its own investigation and resisting any oversight. Sorry, it's going to take one heck of an iron-clad case to get me to agree that our lynx biologists deserve anything less than a prompt termination (if nothing else for incompetence) and possibly prosecution under racketeering laws.
Finally, I want you to consider the massively destructive environmental impacts of such listings, the real reason I wrote my book. Fire conflagration, followed by massive weed infestations, destruction of animal habitat, and enormous secondary consequences to both, especially erosion. Note the export of environmental problems to unregulated countries elsewhere and the social consequences to the destruction of a way of life for people with few options. Consider also that the political and financial sponsors of such listings have both a profit interest and the desire to control every aspect of your life and have said as much in writing.
Perhaps jennyp is too willing to believe the Seattle Times.
It's just that in this particular news item, there are two distinctly different versions of what happened: 1) Biologists planted lynx fur on trapping posts in the wild, which would obviously be a fraudulent attempt to skew the numbers, or 2) biologists put lynx fur samples into sample vials & labeled them in such a way that they never could have been included in the report's numbers, which does not strike me as inherently fraudulent at all.
This is not just a matter of 2 different characterizations of the same story - it's not just 2 competing spins. These are two mutually contradictory sets of specific, hard, factual claims! One of them has to be factually wrong. This is what interests me about the story.
Maybe the confusion comes from this: The 2 WA State biologists were the ones who put them in sample vials with the bogus ID #s - reckless perhaps, but otherwise innocent - which leaves the 5 federal biologists. Maybe they were the ones who put lynx fur on the scratching posts themselves - which would explain where the Wash. Times reporter got that claim from.
CO, IMO all of these stories suffer from a common flaw: None of them completely make clear which set of biologists did which specific act, and so we get 2 conflicting factual claims about what "they" did. But there is no single "they", is there?
These lynx threads have been long on blanket condemnation of envirofascists, which is fine & true. But I saw precious little analysis of the actual facts of the story. Which is why I started this thread in the first place. OK?