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Posted on 01/14/2002 7:45:54 AM PST by Aleutian Longliner
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http://www.fis.com/fis/worldnews/worldnews.asp?l=e&country=&monthyear=&day=&id=638&ndb=1
Dr Jeffrey Koenings, director of the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife. (Photo:WDFW)
Furore over scientists' 'bio-fraud' raises eyebrows in fisheries
UNITED STATES
Monday, January 14, 2002, 20:20 (GMT + 9)
In some quarters, the planted lynx hair has been viewed as evidence of intentional tampering with data by scientists in order to expand areas of protected habitat, where many human activities and industries could be banned. Two scientists working for the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife have been implicated, although there is still dispute over what their objective was. But the incident drew keen interest among natural resource industries, including fisheries.
As evidence of similar problems crops up elsewhere, fishing industry representatives and critics of the environmental movement say that similar problems may have tainted studies that drive regulation of fisheries, particularly where they interact with marine mammals and other "charismatic megafauna."
At the Virginia-based National Wilderness Institute, which bills itself as a "voice of reason on the environment" and concentrates especially on endangered species issues, policy director Jim Streeter said so-called whistle-blowers have started pointing to questionable study practices by government officials around the country.
Within days of the so-called lynx "bio-fraud" surfacing, another effort came to light - this time allegedly involving an attempt by a Washington State official to obtain grizzly bear hair which could have compromised a 3,600-square mile habitat study.
Reps. Richard W. Pombo and John E. Peterson, newly-elected as chairperson and and communications chairperson for the House Western caucus, this week wrote to the Washington Times outlining other instances of what they term "disregard for rural America" by federal officials' distortions. The duo, who support the firing of the biologists as "the only credible alternative" if they did circumvent properly laid-down procedures, said they see it all as part of a pattern of environmental activism prevailing over the rule of law and the best interest of families and communities in the United States.
Earlier this month the National Association of Home Builders was reported as having uncovered a memorandum from an acting Northwest Regional Administrator for the National Marine Fisheries Service that apparently admitted that NMFS' critical habitat designations for West Coast salmonids are baseless and "without an analysis of how much habitat an ESU (Evolutionary Significant Unit) needs".
All of this, said Streeter, poses a serious threat to the credibility of agencies working with the ESA, which could lead to major impacts on various programmes, including commercial fishermen's harvests, as agencies and individual officials pursue their own particular environmental agendas.
That point was echoed by Brent Paine, executive director of the United Catcher Boats a non-profit trade organisation representing North Pacific trawlers and processors. Paine drew a comparison with the way that NMFS handled the Steller sea lion issue in the Bering Sea. He said the agency sought to circumvent the public in a process apparently driven by one official and aimed at pushing through a Biological Opinion that concluded, controversially, that the pollock trawl fishery was jeopardising sea lion populations in the area by out-competing the mammals for prey species. The document was widely viewed in the industry as a power grab by a few officials within NMFS who sought to pin the plight of the sea lions on trawlers, despite evidence to the contrary.
Paine said the opinion ignored inconvenient feeding-pattern data collected by NMFS over some 10 years, among other information. Congress intervened, and the BiOp was eventually overturned, partly on the grounds that the agency worked up it behind closed doors and failed to follow required public-consultation procedures. The document also sought to impose extremely costly fishing closures in areas where the restrictions were considered to have little chance of helping sea lions.
When NMFS was sent back to do the work again, commercial fisheries supporters dug up and produced the ignored scientific data from the NMFS laboratory in Seattle, showing that the fleet was not working the same area as the sea lions when they were feeding. The agency was forced to prepare another BiOp, which imposed less burdensome restrictions and found no jeopardy.
Jerry Schill, president of the North Carolina Fisheries Association, found the "bio-fraud" incident in Washington State interesting enough to circulate news of it to contacts in the industry. He said the news has been severely damaging to various government agencies' credibility, especially in the western part of the United States.
Schill noted that the new round of "bio-fraud" controversy again relates to the Endangered Species Act. He added that he believes recent events support the contention that there are those both in government and in outside it whose philosophy goes well beyond just protecting the environment and crosses into a zeal to halt industry and undermine capitalism and corporate America, by the use of bio-fraud if necessary.
He said eco-terrorism and bio-fraud will undoubtedly form a part of the discussion at an upcoming meeting in Washington DC in May aimed at addressing the Marine Mammal Protection Act and the ESA.
Streeter said as a former government employee he suspects that government officials going as far as planting evidence is very rare. But he also said there's no doubt there are government officials on what he called their own "holy crusade" from within agencies. There have been examples of agencies refusing to accept the implications of scientific data from studies they have commissioned - instead skirting the truth in reports and putting forward flawed conclusions and recommendations to fit with their own goals and objectives, he said.
More than that, the baseline data and field research done in various studies has been found to be very "spotty" and NMFS is among agencies which have chosen to introduce species and sub-species definitions of their own to achieve their own ends, rather than using standard, more widely-accepted biological definitions, said Streeter.
He called the agency's use of ESUs to try to delineate saltwater fish populations is "a further refinement of that," a practice which he noted the US Fish and Wildlife Service does not accept in looking after freshwater species.
Streeter said the issue of government agencies and individual officials pursuing directions unilaterally, as highlighted by the lynx-hair incident in Washington, clearly has nationwide implications and is far from being resolved. The incident is to be looked into in a General Accounting Office audit, inspector-general investigations in the Departments of Agriculture and the Interior, and in House and Senate hearings.
"If this incident proves true, we absolutely have to go back and revisit any federal study of endangered species that biologists from the Washington Division(sic) of Fish and Wildlife participated in," Rep. James V. Hansen, Utah Republican and chairperson of the House Resources Committee, is quoted as saying. He has expressed concern about the potential cost in jobs and access to resources due to improper scientific practices.
Streeter said there could be an innocent explanation for what happened with the two instances in Washington State, since full details have not yet emerged, but he remains skeptical. He acknowledged that in the case of the planting of the lynx hair on rubbing posts in the study in the Gifford and Wenatchee National Forests, the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife has said it was done by two department biologists - possibly involving five other federal Forest and Fish and Wildlife Service officials - in order to test the questioned reliability of associated laboratory tests.
He said that he would have expected there to be study protocols and procedures in place to ensure that, if that kind of cross-check was necessary, it was done only with approval from senior officials and in such a way as to ensure that the study and others were not potentially compromised. He compared the explanation to people robbing a bank and saying afterwards that they did so to test the bank's security.
Dr Jeffrey Koenings, director of the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, has issued an apology over the lynx-hair incident, saying that he was angry and dismayed that two department biologists had been involved in what he called "a breach of proper scientific protocol while involved in a continuing multi-year joint lynx study". Koenings said the two department biologists have now been "barred from further research work," and he and three other top scientific officials for WDFW said the department must now work hard to re-establish its public credibility.
By Quentin Dodd
FIS North America
Mr Koenings, your credibility would go up a bit if you asked the two biologists to look for work elsewhere. How do we know they won't do future research work? Because you tell us so? Don't make me laugh.
The local news showed acontroversy in the Seattle area recently. Environmentalists were trying to stop a highway on ramp project. They said that there were 14 endangered Western Gray Squirrels living in a tree that was going to have to be removed. Apparently, the Western Gray Squirrel had been replaced by the influx of the Eastern Gray Squirrel. They showed pictures of both squirrels and funnily enough they look absolutely identical! The announcer then said that only a biologist could tell them apart. (Sounds reminiscent of the Salmon).
They can obviously interbreed. So what does it matter? Is anyone going to miss the Western Gray Squirrel if and when it is replaced by the Eastern Gray Squirrel? No. No one will be able to tell the difference! Least of all the squirrel's themselves.
I don't know how this story resolved itself, since I just saw it on the tube a while back, but honestly, common sense doesn't enter into the equation with Enviros.
Maybe not at this institution. Even so, they will be able to influence others.
It seems this brand of science is widespread at these institutions.
These people are likely to remain role models for the wacko pseudo scientists for some time to come.
These "scientists" should be barred from working in their chosen field permanently.
That too is fraud and is no less damaging than the lynx fur planting-of-evidence fraud. Selective-inclusion/selective-omission-of-statistics fraud is the most common type of fraud that has besieged the majority of alphabet agencies, activist groups as well as many members of congress.
"Dr Jeffrey Koenings, director of the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife... a breach of proper scientific protocol while involved in a continuing multi-year joint lynx study". Koenings said the two department biologists have now been "barred from further research work," and he and three other top scientific officials for WDFW said the department must now work hard to re-establish its public credibility.
Any hope of restoring credibility starts with correctly naming the lynx fur fraud, fraud. And 'crucifying" the fraudsters for the damages -- monetarily and accessibility -- that their fraud would have caused had they not been caught.. Anything short of that and there will be no credibility and Dr. Jeffery Koenings should be held as an accomplice if he doesn't earnestly push for full accountability laid against the fraudsters.
Hey, Mr. Streeter, I believe it's called Governmental S.O.P.
He said eco-terrorism and bio-fraud will undoubtedly form a part of the discussion at an upcoming meeting in Washington DC in May aimed at addressing the Marine Mammal Protection Act and the ESA. Streeter said as a former government employee he suspects that government officials going as far as planting evidence is very rare. But he also said there's no doubt there are government officials on what he called their own "holy crusade" from within agencies.
The environmentalist wackos use environmentalism as an excuse for the government to gain more property and more control over our lives.
Stay well - Stay safe - Stay armed - Yorktown
By who? Is there anyone "out there" who has the power and professional integrity to make a ban stick? I don't think so. Otherwise, a ban would have already been in place.
The folks who pull these shenanigans and the folks who fund them basically want "us" (as opposed to "them") dead. It's a war and we're not putting up much of a fight.
Only in some quarters it is viewed as tampering...LOL
Stop Bio-fraud, Investigate ESA Input Data
If you are not sure what this is all about get the pdf file which is a compilation of news articles from various sources gathered on the internet. The sources are: The Washington Times, The Washington Post, The Seattle Times, Sierra Times, FOX News, Free-Market.net, Seattle Post-Intellengencer, The Boston Globe and the U.S. Forest Service and many more. It is an PDF format and you can get it here. lynxfraud.pdf
Grab the pdf and use it as a resource to write your congress critter or favorite news reporter. This really does need to be investigated. The only way it will be is to yell and scream about it. If the fraudulent taking of our public land does not interest you read no further, take no action.
Someday you will want to take your children or your grandchildren to a public forest and it will be off limits to humans to preserve the habitat for an animal that is NOT there.
UPDATE
I have updated the pdf file with the 9 more news articles on January 29, 2002. This thing is exploding with interest.
Sign the petition now! Let Congress know you want an investigation!
Rep. James Hansen (R-Utah), chairman of the U.S. House Resources Committee, and Rep. Scott McInnis (R-Colorado), chairman of the U.S. House Forest Subcommittee have requested that the Government Accounting Office (GAO) investigate the incident. Rep. McInnis plans to hold hearings before the Forest subcommittee this spring.
Scream Loud! Scream Now!
http://www.PetitionOnline.com/biolynx/petition.html
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