Federal Politics Trumps Science on Salmon

[JoseCuervo]

Dubya will protect your right to buy 40 guns at the local convention center, but won't protect your right to catch a Salmon...

Federal whistleblower quits, alleges politicization of science

SACRAMENTO - A federal biologist who said his team's advice was illegally ignored prior to a massive 2002 Klamath River fish kill has resigned, accusing the government of politicizing scientific decision-making and misleading the public.

Michael Kelly had sought federal whistleblower protection after he complained the Bush administration violated the Endangered Species Act by pressuring for altered scientific findings by the review team he led for the National Marine Fisheries Service, now NOAA Fisheries.

"My efforts were ultimately unproductive," Kelly laments in his resignation letter, released Wednesday through Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, which represented Kelly in the whistleblower case first reported by The Associated Press. "Threatened coho salmon in the Klamath basin still do not have adequate flow conditions to assure their survival."

Kelly alleged his team's recommendations were twice rejected as the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation imposed lower water levels than were scientifically justified.

California wildlife officials, environmentalists, fishermen and Indian tribes blame low water levels for the death of 33,000 salmon that fall, amounting to nearly a quarter of the projected fall run in the river flowing from south central Oregon through northwest California.

The U.S. Office of Special Counsel declined to investigate Kelly's complaint, saying it could neither prove "gross mismanagement" by NOAA Fisheries even if the agency relied on conflicting science nor prove a cause-and-effect relationship between the low water decision and the subsequent die-off.

Kelly's testimony has since been key in a federal court ruling overturning the agency's long-term water flow plan for the Klamath, though a decision allowing the government to proceed with its plans through 2008 is under appeal.

Kelly resigned from the agency's Arcata, Calif., office Friday after nine years, saying Regional Manager Jim Lecky had again intervened in overturning his finding in the latest project to which he was assigned. He feared a repeat of his ethical predicament two years ago.

NOAA Fisheries officials had no immediate comment.

The latest project is a proposal by the California Department of Fish and Game to rebuild a collapsed levee and re-establish a freshwater pond in what has become a salt marsh at the mouth of the Eel River. Kelly found that the marsh has become an important rearing area for young threatened chinook salmon and other species.

He objects in his letter that the state agency appears to want to turn it back into a freshwater pond mainly to concentrate ducks for convenient hunting. Karen Kovacs, a senior state biologist supervisor, said the state manages the 2,200-acre Eel River Wildlife Area for all aquatic wildlife - freshwater and saltwater - and to that end wants to re-establish a 120-acre pond that collapsed six years ago, while leaving 200 acres as a salt marsh.

As a result of Kelly's finding, PEER called on the state to drop the proposal.

Kelly is the latest in a recent string of scientists to accuse the Bush administration of substituting policy for science, charges the administration denies.

In his Tuesday resignation letter, he accuses his agency of doing so in recent decisions not to list the green sturgeon under the Endangered Species Act; counting hatchery raised salmon along with wild salmon in protection decisions; and an attempt, since blocked by a judge, to alter the definition of dolphin-safe tuna.

"My particular case is just symptomatic of this agency's failure to correctly apply science and caution to its decisions and public pronouncements. I speak for many of my fellow biologists who are embarrassed and disgusted by the agency's apparent misuse of science," Kelly wrote.

"Federal service has just lost another biologist with the integrity to speak up," said Karen Schambach, director of PEER's California office. "It is becoming increasingly difficult for self-respecting scientists to continue working in agencies where politics now routinely and flagrantly trump science."

 

[feclnogn]

Dubya will protect your right to buy 40 guns at the local convention center, but won't protect your right to catch a Salmon...

Actually gunner the Constitution does not mention anything about salmon fishing, however it does in passing if memory serves me correct mention that I have a right to own a firearm. That is a right, fishing is a privelage.

 

[JoseCuervo]

But Fecl,
That is not an "unlimited right" for you to have the firearm. But we should have the unlimited right to fish for salmon every year, within limits...

And I believe there are plenty of Treaty Rights that protect the right to catch Salmon, which is likely the biggest hammer of all in the Salmon crisis.

 

[pawclaws]

The salmon voted for Bush!

 

[JoseCuervo]

And like the more than 600 kids who went to Iraq, it cost the Salmon their lives....

 

[pawclaws]

If you wouldlike tovolunteer I would be happy to sponsor you!

 

[ELKCHSR]

You have to be able to make a commitment to be able to be sponsered...LMAO!!!!
The Presidential slot will be open soon, and all our esteemed gunner can come up with, "I lose money"....Yea so what, do your duty or pay your dues (and that part has nothing to do with money), then you have room to talk....