NewsMax.com
Jan. 28, 2002
Diane AldenA good detective story usually begins with a bang, a murder, a body, an interesting character or a dark and stormy night.
But great mystery stories are as much about character and motivation as they are about intrigue and whodunit. Great detectives are observers; they don't pass up the details, dichotomies and small inconsistencies that lead to solving the mystery. They also see and incorporate patterns of behavior in solving that mystery.
In the end, the ultimate answer is usually a complex of simplicity. But it is only simple once all the parts of the mystery and puzzle are put together and analyzed. Extraordinary mystery writers like P.D. James, Agatha Christie and Dick Francis incorporate their sense of the time, the place and the culture into solving the mystery itself.
All of these elements are important in solving "The Case of the Missing Canadian Lynx."
The Washington Times broke the story, Fox News Cable covered it, and recently Kim Strassel of the Wall Street Journal added her considerable journalistic skills in relating this most recent and obvious case of government abuse.
The Times article reports:
The admission that employees of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Forest Service and Washington state falsified data confirmed what many rural Westerners believe: Agencies are doctoring species and habitat studies to stop logging, ranching and mining on the federal government's vast land holdings. The lynx survey, which is being investigated by several federal agencies, would have been used to establish land-use rules in 16 states and 57 national forests.
Strassel maintains:
The lynx scandal underscores everything that's wrong with Fish and Wildlife and the Forest Service. It shows how the agencies succumbed to a Clinton-era culture that puts ideology ahead of science. It demonstrates the undue influence environmental groups hold over the departments. It also shows how vaguely written laws like the Endangered Species Act can be used to further political agendas, even in the complete absence of hard science.
Furthermore, in 1998 the Forest Service contracted with a member of the Wildlife Conservation Society to do a lynx survey in Oregon and Washington. The contractor reported that lynx hair had been found in both states, which was surprising. No one thought lynx were in the areas listed. That information led to the determination that the lynx was threatened.
Another survey in 1999 found that the employees of the Forest Service considered the results of the survey to be valid. But because a whistle-blower came forward, the hair in the 1999 and 2000 surveys was found to be from "bobcats or coyotes."
California Republican and rural advocate Rep. Richard Pombo defines the case as
[The] latest revelation, that officials from the U.S. Forest Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife planted false evidence of a Canadian Lynx on three occasions in our national forests, received a typical response from the agencies. Instead of terminating the employees, the individuals were given counseling and placed right back on the job to carry on with their environmental activism.
Pombo recounts the case of Donald Fife. Fife was a professional scientist specializing in environmental mining and engineering geology, who learned from a former U.S. Forest Service official that plants listed under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) had been secretly placed on his property in an attempt to close about 30,000 acres of the highest mineral-valued land in Southern California.
Exposing the Pattern
We see a pattern developing. The facts in the case of the missing lynx include a documented previous instance of abuse of power by the Forest Service. In both cases the facts are indisputable. But the facts don't tell the entire story.
At the moment, the most obvious and prime suspect in the abuse of federal power is the Clinton administration. That administration seemed to institutionalize the notion that the ends justify the means.
The cultural and political atmosphere in that administration made things worse across the federal landscape. From the Department of Justice to the Department of the Interior, scandal erupted at every turn and bureaucrats and bureaucracies were politicized beyond the norm.
In the case of the politicization and corruption of green bureaucracies in particular, Bill Clinton and his secretary of the interior, Bruce Babbitt, are the obvious suspects. But are they really the guilty parties?
It is not unusual for conservatives and Republicans to blame the Clinton administration for the dishonesty and corruption that took place during his reign in office. That is also true in the recent case of the missing Canadian Lynx. Fingers are pointed in the direction of Clinton and Babbitt.
I could spend days pointing fingers at Babbitt and Clinton. Their efforts, in addition to those of America's premier foundations – the Pew Charitable Trust, Rockefeller, Alton Jones, Turner, McArthur and Ford – and the United Nations, the international treaties America has signed, and the centrally planned economic agenda of multinational corporations and financial institutions – all of the powers that be have had a negative impact on public environmental policy.
The collusion and corruption have been a horror for rural America and for the rule of law – not to mention the Constitution..
As an investigator, I could point a finger at the deaf and dumb American churches for making environmentalism a part of their social justice campaign. That campaign by and large does nothing for justice for the rural poor and certainly nothing for the environment, except to deify it. It is a selective justice that has nearly destroyed rural America.
I could point to environmentalists, whose cause in recent years has been co-opted by quasi-religious extremists on one hand and corporate green interests on the other. What have suffered are science, the truth, the environment, common sense, and cooperation between rural types, government and the greens.
Their cause has created a new class of poor and killed off many small communities – communities, by the way, that offer a simpler, less materialistic and cleaner alternative to urban living.
In addition, the American public has allowed itself to be flimflammed by corporate green groups with pleas for money as these monied interests use scare tactics and propaganda plus myth, which they serve up as truth.
The public has been ill served by a media that take their environmental "stories" off press releases written by billion-dollar green organizations like the Sierra Club and National Wildlife Federation.
That same press has adopted the mindset and language of the environmental true believers. That same press spins tales about a "fragile" ecosystem and "endangered" species.
Those tales are often myths based on lies and half-truths, but they are related as the gospel by CBS, the Times, the Post, CNN and National Geographic. Yet seldom has the press bothered to question the lies, the manipulation, the half truths. Never do the media test what is claimed by the special interests.
When something is truly an environmental concern, the various groups are too busy hunting down easy targets or creating the next nightmare environmental scenario. Green is big business, and the mystery is that very few members of our elite power structure have discovered how dangerous and manipulative and full of lies that green business really is.
Think Enron and think how corporate structures and bureaucracies can hide the truth. An unquestioning attitude and a lack of priorities have been the downfall of correcting real environmental abuses.
Nevertheless, what is at stake in the case of the missing Canadian Lynx is institutional credibility, not to mention lives, livelihoods and the environment of rural and urban areas.
Institutional manipulation of the system has been the instrument in the destruction of trust and cooperation between those who work the land and those who would seek to drive people off the land.
The result is that trust in government entities like the Forest Service, the BLM, and most certainly the Fish and Wildlife Service may be lost forever. For the time being, the Luddites in the environmental movement will have their way, but the environment and trust in the federal government to do a job will be the poorer for it.
Discovering the Motive
Dr. Alston Chase, environmentalist, philosopher and former lecturer at Harvard, Oxford and Princeton, wrote a seminal work on the rising tyranny of ecology: "In a Dark Wood."
Dr. Chase indicates that things began to go wrong in the Forest Service and other federal land agencies long before Bill Clinton or Bruce Babbitt came on the scene. Although the destruction of rural America accelerated under the Clinton regime, the institutional mindset and practices in the green bureaucracies changed long ago.
Chase recounts that by 1979 a Louis Harris poll showed that Forest Service employees were already more "save/conserve oriented" than the general public. The Forest Service and other federal green agencies began to be divided into two classifications, the younger "baby boomer biocentrists" and the older forest rangers at the top.
Furthermore, "the silviculture-educated foresters were bossing biologists who had spent more time in school but less time in the woods." However, as the older generation retired, the new guys moved up. With that move, Chase says, "politics outstripped science, agency and environmentalist values forged beyond what the researchers knew."
These new green kids on the federal block accepted the theories of biocentrism. Indeed, the "ecologists" rejected science and the scientific method in many instances.
Where the older scientists thought that nature is not stable or a constant but rather forever in a state of flux and chaos, the newer "ecologists" believed that stability was the norm and could be possible by creation or designation of their invention.
Thus, vast ecosystems were concocted, systems that had no boundaries, beginning or end. The ecosystems of their creation often had no real history – there had been too much chaos and change for that. Nor could they explain how an ecosystem began, what was its history and how long had it been an ecosystem.
Rather, the ecologist agenda was to conceive of some kind of restoration of a "pristine" environment. But no one knew exactly when such an environment existed, so they built a time frame that created a system before the white man came to America.
They call it pre-Columbian times, and that is the direction in which the ecologists are trying to take federal land policies. However, pristine conditions and ecosystems were created by the theorists; seldom did science have anything to do with determining how things really were.
There was no admission that the environment changes constantly, regardless of what man does or does not do. There was no admission that billions of species, eras and epochs had changed long before people were on the scene – even in America. The American Indian was held up as the "perfect" interactor with the environment, when proof indicates that was just not so.
But the true believers wanted white man's "footprint" on the land to be eradicated. That is not hyperbole, that is what is happening across the United States at this very moment.
Today in the back country of the U.S. the Forest Service closes roads so that man cannot access the forest for even minimal use. They are digging 10-foot-deep pits so that even horses can't access those roads. They destroy old homesteads, and even the modern-day American Indian is finding that the Forest Service and the BLM do not respect their habitations and imprints on the land.
Ask the Timbasha of Death Valley or the Dann sisters of Nevada, or the Hispanic loggers in New Mexico how little concern the government has for their history and their modern-day livelihood.
Dr. Hegel and the Red Herring
During the radical and extreme 1960s, it wasn't just music or culture that changed drastically. Clinging to the leftist causes of the "me" generation was the "me too" environmental movement.
A favorite instrument of collectivists and socialists, including people like Herbert Marcuse and Antonio Gramsci, environmentalism was the socially acceptable wedge that would be used to bring down capitalism as well as our belief in individual rights and private property, which developed out of the Great Awakening and the Enlightment.
What became important were not individuals but rather "the one," the "whole," the collective. In addition, at this time humanity was looked upon as a cancer that could do no good to the environment. Part of the intent of population control is to break man's legs so he can't leave a footprint.
In the era of the '70s, according to Dr. Chase, at least half of the Forest Service and green bureaucrats and bureaucracies had allegiances to the cause of "biocentrism." That is as much a philosophical belief system as it is a pseudo-science. It has the language, but often lacks the data and the scientific method.
It did, however, offer some kind of zeitgeist to accomplish a politicized agenda. Chase documents how government "scientists" who have taken "biocentrism" as the gospel now hold allegiances and animosities toward those who seek to make use of the land in extractive industries or food production.
The institutional culture is one of preservation rather than conservation. It is now more about aesthetics and promoting little if any human interaction with the environment. The ultimate goal is to return to a state "before the white man came."
The new true green believers, in Chase's words, "confused philosophy with science and fact and value. ... [I]t embraced new values based on systems ecology, which from the beginning was less a preservation science than a program for social control. ... [I]t viewed the exercise of individual liberty as a threat."
Part of the mystery in the long cultural and historical road to the case of the missing Canadian lynx is congressional response. Since the '60s Congress has responded badly to what was perceived as man abusing the environment.
A flood of legislation resulted. Poorly thought out, just as with LBJ's War on Poverty, the laws did more damage than good. Just as the War on Poverty destroyed the black family, environmental laws have destroyed the rural poor.
It was during the idealistic, albeit unscientific, '60s and '70s that cultural Marxism found its way into the system and plenty of really terrible ideas were carved into stone. They include the Wilderness Act of 1964, the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act of 1967 and the Endangered Species Act of 1969.
Eventually, these laws would lead to FLPMA, the Federal Land Planning Management Act of 1976. Out of FLPMA came the era of increasing hostility by the federal government to man's use and enjoyment of the environment.
After FLPMA, federal land managers began to sweep through the Intermountain West in a quest to change practices and rescind promises made to rural workers, stakeholders, communities and families in a previous era.
But there was no balance in this new shift in policy. Instead, statist values became the order of the day whether or not they made sense. These values were not better values – they merely replaced the old ones. In so doing, there was no attempt at accommodation between old and new values, regardless of lip service paid to cooperation.
It was the fatal combination of environmental groups gone left, with redesigning the language and taking the ephemeral language of "biocentrism" and ecology and creating a set of unscientific values, which did not leave any room for compromise.
Because of that fact, lives were destroyed, and misunderstanding about man's place in the environment was never fully understood by either side in the debate.
This influx of green theorists manifested in the late '70s. That was the real beginning of federal claims on water rights in the West and on huge chunks of states like Alaska.
Democrat Jimmy Carter assigned hundreds of millions of acres to Wilderness status In Alaska. Bill Clinton was the next president to do the same. In Alaska, much of the state was left for an elite few to hunt or fish or bird-watch. Precious little was left for the people of Alaska to use for economic or personal reasons. The tax base suffered, and Alaska became a colony of D.C.
That attitude continues today in places like Nevada, the Klamath Basin, and anywhere water or beautiful vistas exist. The debate over drilling in the ANWR is not about science or what is good for Caribou, but rather about a political and philosophical agenda gone awry.
Another tactic by the new complex of federal agencies and corporate green groups was to abrogate private property and its value by a draconian implementation of the Endangered Species Act.
What began as an idea with good intentions eventually led down the path to extremism, government control, and misuse and abuse of the environment and the rural poor. Increasingly strict controls on recreational uses are being implemented each year as more lands are denied to the public.
There was no rational system developed. Priorities were skewed in favor of the wish list of environmentalists. Scattered and incompetent efforts at improving federal lands prevailed and became the rule.
Federal agencies spent most of the time in court fighting off green demands and paying billions in court case judgments brought by green groups. That left less money to make improvements on the land in federal hands.
On the other hand, more green 'scientists' were bringing their agenda with them as they moved up the ranks of the federal agencies and cooperated with activist environmental groups in numerous court cases.
Solution to Saving Species Is No Mystery
At this point in time, little has been "saved" by the government or green efforts – and that includes species.
The salvation of most species came about from the cooperation of rural people with private individuals and groups such as Ducks Unlimited and the Elk Foundation. It was the rural ag producer who maintained water resources and kept the lands that brought wildlife back.
The greens, however, are not happy with that. Many believe that is not a "natural" condition, and they criticize the improvement the rurals have made. If that is not a Luddite attitude, nothing is. There was absolutely no concern for the impact of such attitudes on rural areas and their people as the destruction of rural America continued.
What was created out of all this was a branch of government almost separate from the legislative, executive and judicial. That other branch is represented by the Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and other lesser subgroups.
They receive funding from the government, but they increase their budgets from green activism. In a quid pro quo, the federal agencies and the greens have set up a marriage of convenience punctuated by court battles that really are not battles at all but rather a way for green institutions to line their own pockets and a further attempt to remove people from rural America.
The casualties are the environment, the rural poor and the rule of law. The late President Dwight David Eisenhower warned of the military-industrial complex. He could not have foreseen the foundation-multinational corporation-green machine-federal bureaucracy complex that now controls much of what happens to the citizens, economy and health of the land mass of the United States.
Part II next time: The Forest Service 1998 Code of Scientific Ethics and how it was broken. The Clinton administration's part in law breaking. The case of a woman akin to Karen Silkwood whose life may be in danger by what she knows.
Check out www.aldenchronicles.com and write to me at alden@newsmax.com
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Diane Alden is a research analyst with a background in political science and economics. Her work has appeared in the Washington Times as well as NewsMax.com, Enterstageright, American Partisan and many other online publications. She also does radio commentaries for Steve Myers' show on Liberty Works Monday and Friday mornings, and can be heard regularly on Mike Fleming, WREC in Memphis.
NewsMax.com
Connecting the Dots in the Case of the Missing Canadian Lynx
Feb. 7, 2002
Diane AldenI promised a Part 2 in "The Case of the Missing Canadian Lynx." Well, the story has turned into a full-blown investigation because of the amount of information I have received.
After my last piece, "The Case of the Missing Canadian Lynx, Part 1," I heard from officials in Washington, D.C., and Washington state. Suffice it to say, this is a real, live detective story. It may not be as glitzy as the Enron case, but it has all the elements of the Enron story and then some.
The honesty and credibility of federal green agencies is in question and needs scrutiny that is unbiased and objective. Such scrutiny is sorely lacking.
The REAL problem is that Congress and the various investigative agencies are intimidated by or in total agreement with a movement that has grown so powerful, and has infiltrated government agencies so thoroughly, that it has almost become a government entity unto itself. Congress has dropped the ball on this development – in many cases it has promoted it.
What I am discovering is that dishonesty and conflict of interest reaches from the elected Congress to appointed bureaucrats. The discovery involves federal "scientists" who, instead of acting as real scientists, have become agents of the environmental movement's most radical elements.
As a retired biologist for the Fish and Wildlife Service told me recently, "The employee sees it day in and day out. It's a top-down culture and the top people encourage it. ... The environmentalists started off well-intentioned, but grants and big money corrupted [the movement]. As for the federal government, the scientists hired were not qualified, and since the early '80s they had an agenda that did not favor natural resource users."
It is becoming more apparent to me that over the last 25 years or so a grab bag of green activists and quota employees have become the heart and soul of these federal green agencies. Their loyalty is not necessarily to truth-seeking or science, but rather to promoting certain interest groups' agendas.
As they have been expanding budgets, turf and personnel, private property as well as federal lands have been adversely and unfairly administered.
The case of the "missing" Canadian lynx is only a small part of the total picture of what has gone wrong.
It should come as no surprise that all this grew worse, much worse, under Bill Clinton and his secretary of the interior, Bruce Babbitt. However, the sad fact is that the politicization and infiltration of the agencies by agenda- and philosophy-driven greens began long ago.
From Little Radicals Mighty Movements Grow
In the '60s, a confluence of disparate elements in the environmental movement allied itself under the banner of "ecology."
That term first came into use in 1866 when German philosopher, zoologist and evolutionist Ernst Haeckel coined it. Ecology refers to his belief that nature is an organic whole.
The idea is not original; it goes back to Plato, and Herbert Spencer later gave it a political twist.
Dr. Alston Chase is an environmentalist with a background in philosophy and science. He has taught at Harvard and Princeton. His book "In a Dark Wood" is considered a classic and the best investigation into how the spotted owl controversy began and the nature of the philosophy that fueled the listing of the spotted owl and closed down an entire industry.
As Dr. Chase puts it, "Society itself was a kind of biological organism where the WHOLE was more important than the individual parts."
The new "discipline" or "science" of ecology received legitimacy when attempts to clean up our environmental act turned into one crisis scenario after another.
When government grant money came into the picture, that was the end of objective science and probably the end of balance regarding the environment and government. Government unions, agencies and the powers that be had discovered an entirely new area for budgets and recognition and power.
The problem was that these agencies were also allowed to be driven by those with an elitist green agenda.
However, it was the idea that the ends justify the means that suited the Clinton years to a T. When Bill Clinton came into office, the questionable, controversial and political "biocentrist" approach to the environment was adopted.
At the heart of biocentrism is the notion that man is no more important in the scheme of things than a pig, a dog, a fairy shrimp or a spotted owl.
Dr. Chase maintains that "the biocentric ideal ... confers equal importance on all living things, from elk to beetles. ... The new science [ecology] seemed to say that conditions were good so long as ecosystems kept all the parts and remained in balance."
As air and water improved, the environmental movement began looking for new challenges and new problems to solve. It grew so large and well-financed, so addicted to big money and grants, and so politically adept that it was not only activist about nature, it became a political powerhouse.
Coddled and unquestioned by the media, protected from oversight, funded by high-profile Hollywood stars, major capitalists like Ted Turner and George Soros, and major American foundations, year after year it added new dimensions to its sacred-cow status.
But in the bargain Americans didn't just get cleaner air or sensible policies about water, air and the environment. Rather, we were run over by a belief system that had redefined nature into a philosophical construct.
We cleaned up our fouled nest in pretty short order, but then we burned it and killed off or pushed the birds out of the nest.
Then we took the concept of nature and made it an end in itself. Along with that change in values, environmentalism morphed into a combination of a quasi-religion and a quasi-capitalist venture.
We got lost when sensible environmental goals became a "crusade" to save absolutely every bug, beetle, newt and weed on the planet. We expanded that crusade until it took over entire parts of the United States.
At the moment, 42 percent of this country is locked up in federal or state hands. Even more millions of acres are now in the hands of elite groups and special interests and individuals, from Ted Turner to The Nature Conservancy.
Government scientists and government-funded scientists, people who should have remained objective, did not. Instead, they were driven to do what they had to, to "further the cause." That was what was expected of them and that was what they believed in. Money and their livelihood were at stake.
Balance between what became two competing value systems was not well served by conflicted federal agencies, federal biologists and the many under-qualified government scientists who sought to "further the cause."
As one agent informed me, "experience was out, requirements done away with, a spoils system and quotas were part and parcel of the way things were. It was institutional and filtered down."
The Imbalance in the Nature of the Bureaucracy
Federal green agencies have another serious problem that Congress does not seem to want to deal with. That problem involves grants given to the greens from the budgets of federal agencies themselves.
I have found that those grants are often used to promote the goals of the most extreme green agenda at the expense of the rural poor. Again, there has been no balance and certainly no congressional oversight to speak of.
I have discovered in speaking to Forest Service personnel, current and retired, that balance has not existed for over a decade. The grant-making process involving the federal green agencies is a scandal – that is their opinion, not mine.
Former federal biologist James Beers was driven out of the Fish and Wildlife Service when he blew the whistle on the grant-making. He refused to approve a grant and had to leave the agency. Not long ago, he won a suit against the federal government.
As a whistle-blower, he has been marginalized and vilified, by both federal agencies and the environmental movement, with untrue implications that he is a member of a militia or involved in some right-wing conspiracy.
From what I can tell, you don't do two things. You don't challenge the greens in any way, do not point out their inconsistencies or faults or wrong-headed thinking. Secondly, you don't pretend the federal government is seeking the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
Such grants include funds to groups like the Fund for Animals, a group immersed in radical ideas and agendas, in my book not a mainstream group.
But even if it were, green groups should not be receiving grants in order to promote a value system that will destroy a competing value system if fully implemented. Especially when that grant will be used to destroy entire sections of the economy and rope off entire sections of the country to public use.
There are plenty of investigations, but the connection between certain politicians and the greens is corrosive. Money and influence talk loudly in Congress.
The rural types lack the numbers, so their voices are seldom heard, let alone considered. The "hearings" on environmental issues, conducted in the hinterlands, are very often skewed and manipulated and turned to favor a radical green agenda.
An investigation into Bill Clinton's "road closure" uncovered so much collusion and corruption between the various government agencies, the White House, and Pew Charitable Trust, as well as the arrogance of the people involved, that it should have had a million people marching on D.C.
The House counsel who wrote the summary report wrote such a scathing condemnation of the entire affair, I was a surprised to see it all laid out in so many words. But nothing has come of it – yet.
A 'Rose by Any Other Name' Is Not Science
What boggles the mind is how much "science" associated with federal agencies has been politicized. Studies are not pursued using the scientific method but rather are clouded by an agenda that is not a science or even a discipline, but a philosophy.
Whether it is the Canadian lynx, the wolf or grizzly, the results of those studies are often predetermined or skewed by manipulation of the "science" involved.
Also questionable are the scientific credentials of the "scientists." Many of our federal "biologists" are more politician than scientist. More environmental activist than careful and methodical researcher. They are more likely trained in systems management than biology.
But if they are smart, they know which way the wind is blowing and act accordingly.
The fact is that their world is more political than it is scientific. The fabrication of the lynx study is only a small part of it.
There is a conflict of interest, a one-way war between two value systems at the heart of the Canadian lynx case.
The problem is that the fabrication in the Canadian lynx study is not an isolated incident. Fraud and fabrication and manipulation are endemic in the entire house of cards that comprise the federal green agencies, the American foundations, and the green business and its friends in Congress.
I have discovered that federal and state elected bodies by and large pay attention only to the testimony of environmental groups and what they have to say.
When the Canadian lynx investigation took place in Washington state, the only testimony heard by the investigating committee was from one Forest Service supervisor, two Washington state supervising biologists and THREE spokesmen for environmental groups.
As far as I can ascertain, there was no testimony from anyone who had done an outside peer review of the science regarding the lynx. Nor were the "scientists" who had fabricated the data allowed to testify.
There was no outside audit or oversight of any of the state or federal agencies in the conduct of the matter. There was an internal investigation and that was that. Case closed.
Names in the Forest Service report on the lynx case were redacted, blacked out. The Forest Service says it was to "protect the privacy" of the "scientists" involved. I did manage to find out the names of the two Washington state scientists, but as far as I can tell, they aren't talking.
Although State Senator Robert Morton did his level best in seeking an honest investigation, he and a few other "bravehearts" were stonewalled.
Sen. Morton's district would have been severely impacted by the results of the lynx study, and even he was not able to find out the names of the Forest Service "scientists" involved in the fabrication.
Stonewalling seems to be a full-time occupation on many levels of government these days. So what else is new, hey?
The scandal in all this is not isolated to the Canadian lynx debacle as uncovered by the Washington Times. Small newspapers in Washington state and newsletters had been talking about it for some time before it broke nationally.
The real scandal is the fact that an agency of the federal government, with the power to close entire "ecosystems" to human use, has no real auditing or outside oversight system over its own actions that are worth a damn.
When the Forest Service says the Office of Inspector General is investigating wrongdoing, don't be impressed. Such investigations should be conducted by outside agencies, not another agency of the federal government.
Just as Arthur Andersen was a lousy auditor of Enron, there are too many ties and too much covering up and too many careers and lives at stake. In both cases it was the fox guarding the hen house or the wolf guarding the sheep.
More correctly, it's like two wolves asking the sheep, "What's for dinner?"
The recent lynx scandal may also be connected to another instance of questionable science and "tainted" data.
In the Oregon case in 1999, Dr. John Weaver was doing a study on numbers of Canadian lynx in a potential "wilderness" area in Oregon. He is the man who developed the scratch-post tool as a method of finding out how many animals live in a potential '"wilderness" area.
Weaver admitted that his lynx study was tainted. That case was never fully resolved, and it was business as usual. One wonders if the forensics lab in both cases of "tainted" science was the same lab. All sorts of other unanswered questions and unsolved mysteries pop up because no one is demanding the answers.
However, it goes further than that. It extends all the way into Canada. The Canadians had similar problems with a grizzly bear study between Jasper and Banff. Again, scientists with an agenda were set loose as they attempted to close off the Bow Valley to all but minimal human activity.
Accusations of "tainted" evidence and manipulated science were discussed by Canadian scientists who saw a decision being made using a contaminated chain of evidence. A "study" that was not helped by the "scientist" in charge of the grizzly study. A scientist who had previously stated that he would do what he had to "for the cause."
In the case of the grizzly, that cause was an endangered listing and a wilderness designation that would have ended most human activity in large areas between Banff and Jasper.
As someone who sees the bigger picture in all this, what this is really about is instituting the Wildlands Project one study, one park, one "corridor" at a time.
That Wildlands Project, which came out of the radical Earth First! environmental group, is now considered mainstream.
The biologists and scientists involved in this effort would hardly be considered not to have a political agenda. It stretches credulity to think that they are objective. They can't be, because as "systems" biologists they don't see anything but furthering the benefits of the "system."
These scientists don't just study a condition, animal or situation, they already know that this is about proving the need to create a system that includes corridors thousands of miles long. They are only trying to prove that the corridor is necessary to "save" an endangered species. This is not science – this is philosophy.
My Way or NO Way – the Green Way
The fact is the environmental movement does not want any activity on federal lands. No logging at all. No compromise at all, no balance at all. Time and time again spokesmen for these groups say they don't want any money to be made off of federal lands.
Recently, Fox News Cable had a segment on timber salvage sales in Montana. The biggest complaint of a young man from a major environmental group was that someone might make money off the sale.
There was no statement at all about whether or not that sale would benefit both the environment, the forest and the people.
It was just one of many instances where environmentalists' biggest complaint was that money was in the deal. They did not want the caulk-booted loggers driving their pickups to make a dime off such a sale.
If that is not a conflict of values, nothing is. To me it reflects the fact that basically the greens are purists. They think the only reason that natural resources or "nature" exist is as a value apart from what they can do for man.
Maybe so. But when that attitude makes the environment worse off, in addition to not being a benefit or money maker – it's flat dumb.
The purists think "nature's way" is the only way. Thus, they would rather see a forest burn than to put in roads or water resources or to clear-cut sections to prevent catastrophic fires.
God forbid some poor guy in Smalltown, Oregon, should make a dime cutting trees they are willing to see burned. NO BALANCE and certainly no fairness to those who have placed nature over God and man.
Yet these same purist groups accept grants, aid and political favors, will tell half-truths and encourage the fudging, if not outright fabrication, of data to accomplish their purist ends. The same groups have won millions in litigation that they engage in at the expense of the environment and the taxpayer.
The Justification of the End Game
The end game is to get rid of those who seek to make any use of federal lands. Not just logging, but also small mining or large mining, grazing, off-road vehicles, snowmobiling, hunting, fishing, and yes – even tourism.
Oddly, these various groups of federal lands users can be set one against the other. The various groups don't notice as they are flimflammed into believing they have special status in how the use of federal lands is divvied up.
News for those folks – hang together or hang separately. The environmental movement and the federal green bureaucracies are not happy with controlling over 42 percent of the land – they want total control over private property as well, and they want everyone off that land.
Since the bogus, and I do mean bogus, spotted owl controversy, logging on federal lands has dropped 89 percent.
The greens state that the federal government was losing money on it anyway. That is an outright lie. It is not even a half-truth – it is pure and simple a lie.
The fact is the federal government DOES make money on logging. What it doesn't make money on are the stuff like public relations work, the interpretive girlies they send into the woods to spout the green doctrine, and sundry side efforts and administrative costs involved in lawsuits.
But the scandal is that the grants given to green groups take a big chunk of the budget as well. On one hand, the feds nearly move heaven and earth to kill off a lucrative relationship while on the other hand promote another that will mean that federal agency loses money.
What a country. That is why the Forest Service is running a losing proposition.
Meanwhile, certain members of Congress and their families, friends and contributors have made out like bandits in land swaps, sweetheart deals and outright gaming the system.
That in and of itself should have been investigated by Congress years ago.
I take that back – it should have an outside investigation and an auditing, because otherwise when the lynx controversy blows over, it will be same stuff, different day.
As in all things – follow the money. As usual, "power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely."
Hey, Congress – Snap out of It
If I were a congressional committee I would get that redacted Forest Service report on the internal lynx investigation. I would find out who was involved. Then I would begin to seriously look into the connections between federal agents and radical or not-so-radical green groups.
Even the Sierra Club and Audubon Society don't have clean hands or an unpoliticized agenda. They want the lynx listed and they want more wilderness and they want the loggers, miners, ranchers and others off of what they consider "their" land.
The actions they have taken in the past against individuals and industries, mostly small, tell me that they will scream bloody murder till they get their way.
The fact is all the double dealing and back scratching are costing the taxpayers and the rural areas of America jobs and livelihoods, and in fact do not do the environment a bit of good.
All of this has cost major bucks, meanwhile, because of poor management. Forests continue to burn and critters die, and the purists think that is fine and dandy.
They would rather see entire areas go to hell or up in smoke than have one single soul making a buck off harvesting of trees, minerals, grass and, more often than not, the enjoyment of nature itself.
With all my heart I believe they would rather see it burn.
The honest people in the Forest Service and other federal agencies, the ones who seek a balance between "preserving" nature and human use of natural resources, are marginalized or kept out of the loop or pushed out. Because of the incessant barrage of lies, half-truths and lawsuits used against federal agencies by the green groups, the federal agencies have begun to capitulate to the intimidation and threats.
These litigious green groups are more often than not mainstream environmental groups that make millions off these lawsuits. Meanwhile, the species and the environment they say they want to save go begging because there is no money left to "save" them.
Over the next several columns I am inviting you on this investigation. Like the TV show "Unsolved Mysteries," I am asking for your help.
As I am discovering, "The Case of the Missing Canadian lynx" is not unique. The tainted study is not the first act of corruption and obfuscation by federal employees and their associates in the environmental movement. It reaches from the states to D.C.
It has got to be dealt with and soon, before government is corrupted any further and before we lose what freedoms we have left.
Please check out www.aldenchronicles.com or write to me at alden@newsmax.com
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Diane Alden is a research analyst with a background in political science and economics. Her work has appeared in the Washington Times as well as NewsMax.com, Enterstageright, American Partisan and many other online publications. She also does radio commentaries for Steve Myers' show on Liberty Works Monday and Friday mornings, and can be heard regularly on Mike Fleming, WREC in Memphis.
Lynx fraud blamed on 'bad judgment'
March 2, 2002
By Audrey Hudson
THE WASHINGTON TIMESAn investigation of federal scientists who submitted inauthentic samples to a national lynx survey found a lack of scientific rigor and poor judgment but no criminal intent, said a report by Inspector General Earl E. Devaney, released by the Interior Department last night.
The report said the Department of Justice declined to prosecute the Fish and Wildlife Service biologists, who said they sent hair samples from a captive lynx and a pelt to test a lab's ability to identify lynx hair using DNA testing.
The employees, whose names have not been released, were counseled for what the report called "a pattern of bad judgment," but Mr. Devaney recommended "more meaningful punishment" and additional administrative action against other employees in the regional office and headquarters. Bob's Note: Worse things happen to you just for a parking ticket. And of course, you could be sure that YOUR NAME WOULD BE RELEASED, if anything you did was this serious. The investigators are probably complicit in the crime that was committed and they are protecting their own butts from being investigated.
"The policy decision by FWS to administer 'corrective action' in lieu of meaningful punishment displays a cultural bias against holding employees accountable for their behavior," Mr. Devaney said.
Lawmakers expressed concern that the false samples, which will be used to determine how to protect the lynx, could have forced the closure of roads to vehicle traffic in national forests. Also banned in lynx habitat are off-road vehicles, snowmobiles, skis, snowshoes, livestock grazing and tree thinning.
The inspector general said he "tends to believe the assertion" the employees submitted the samples to test the lab's accuracy. However, assertions that there was no prior knowledge that a Washington state agency was submitting similar inauthentic samples during the same time "is simply not credible," he wrote.
The incidents were first reported by The Washington Times in December, and outraged lawmakers immediately called for congressional hearings and investigations. Bob's Note: Sure the lawmakers were "outraged." Such posturing and bullshit by the suckup media. See if a single law gets changed regarding this fraud. If YOUR GODDAMNED CONGRESSIONAL REPRESENTATIVES WERE DOING THEIR JOBS THIS WOULDN'T HAVE HAPPENED IN THE FIRST PLACE!
Mr. Devaney agreed with federal officials who have said since the incident was uncovered that the samples "ultimately were determined to have no negative effect on the lynx survey or the management of the forest in which the samples were reportedly found."
The biologists and the Washington state agency submitted at least three inauthentic samples of lynx hair as part of a three-year survey to determine Canadian lynx habitat in 16 states and 57 national forests. The hair samples were labeled as having been recovered from national forests, but in fact were taken from captive lynx and at least one pelt.
The employees were given a salary bonus after it was discovered that they had violated the study protocol.
"Awarding the involved employees with monies and specifically praising their work on the lynx study so soon after the incident is not only an incredible display of bad judgment, but also highlights FWS's excessively liberal award policy and practice, which the OIG has criticized in the past," Mr. Devaney wrote.
The findings of a separate investigation by the General Accounting Office will be released at a March 7 congressional hearing. The investigation was requested by Republican Reps. James V. Hansen of Utah, House Resources chairman, and Scott McInnis of Colorado, Resources forest and forest health subcommittee chairman.
"I look forward to hearing the GAO's testimony next week, where they've investigated all three of the agencies involved. Certainly, there are parts of the IG's investigation that are very alarming," Mr. McInnis said.
"The idea that these people got a merit pay raise, in conjunction with the same lynx study they undermined, no less, quite literally boggles the mind. It shows the kind of brazen mind-set we're up against," Mr. McInnis said.
Investigations also were initiated by the Interior Department, at the request of Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton.
The inspector general at the Agriculture Department, where the Forest Service is housed, also is investigating the incident.
The employees were counseled for their actions, but Mr. Devaney recommended "more meaningful punishment for those previously counseled" and additional administrative action against other employees in the regional office and headquarters.
Mr. McInnis said the IG's recommendations are "right on target" but questioned whether the intent of the employees was to test laboratory accuracy.
"On the one hand, the IG says this particular biologist isn't credible, and on the other, the IG says he tends to believe his story about testing the lab," Mr. McInnis said.
Mr. Devaney also recommended that Mrs. Norton convene a working group to "review and make recommendations on how to restore rigorous science to the Endangered Species program" and implement a scientific code of ethics.
In releasing the findings, Mrs. Norton issued a brief statement saying she has instructed top Fish and Wildlife Service officials to "review the report and make recommendations to me to address its findings."
Interior investigators conducted more than 20 interviews and reviewed "countless documents" in their inquiry, which was limited to the behavior of employees in their agency.
"Examples of bad judgment ranged from unauthorized sample submissions by field biologists to the failure of regional and headquarters managers to recognize the significance of the incident and to execute timely and appropriate responses," Mr. Devaney said.
