Friday — April 2, 2004

Bush should call off science censors

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Six of America’s leading marine scientists from prestigious U.S. universities say they were referred to as "radical environmentalists" by an administrator of the National Marine Fisheries Service after they were hired by the government to study salmon recovery methods as part of a federal report.

The scientists’ recommendations were stripped from the report. Earlier this week, the six went public with their findings, which were published in the journal "Science."

What had the six done to qualify for this kind of treatment? They recommended that the fisheries service rewrite its regulations to guarantee continued federal protection of wild salmon and steelhead in California, Oregon and Washington.

The scientists made that recommendation to resolve what they called a ridiculous situation in which large numbers of hatchery fish are propping up populations, while federal protection of wild spawning grounds is being reduced at the same time.

Federal protection is in jeopardy because a federal court recently gave hatchery fish the same standing as wild fish.

The scientists took issue with a judge’s view that hatchery fish and wild fish are the same. Not so, say the scientists.

The judge’s decision was akin to equating domestic dogs with wolves. They’re not the same, even if they look the same.

At stake are 15 distinct populations of wild salmon and steelhead diminished enough to be listed as endangered or threatened under the Endangered Species Act. Listing will affect the operations of developers, ranchers, farmers and loggers, and they are none too happy about it.

The act of deep-sixing the recommendations of a group of dedicated scientists is more than a little disturbing.

Scientific data must be allowed to stand on its own. To hide conclusions of good scientists based on good data—even differing conclusions—is censorship at its worst. To hide data or conclusions because they differ with someone’s untested ideology, is to sentence the nation to a prison of ignorance.

This smearing of competence is emerging as part of a larger pattern in the Bush administration. Recently, 20 Nobel laureates and science advisors to past Republican presidents wrote an open letter denouncing the Bush administration for "suppressing, distorting or manipulating the work done by scientists."

When President George Bush told the world, "You’re either with us or against us," no one imagined he would include truth, science, integrity and the ecology of the earth among his opponents.

Wolfgang Panofsky, a retired Stanford physicist who has advised the U.S. government on science and national security since Eisenhower, says of the Bush science policy, "…this is as bad as it’s ever been…there is such a thing as objective scientific reality, and if you ignore that or try to misrepresent it in formulating policy, you do so at peril to the country."

We could not have said it better.

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