Here's a little quiz: Which of the following books is pro-environment and which anti? Science Under Siege: Balancing Technology and the Environment by Michael Fumento, or Science Under Siege: The Politicians' War on Nature and Truth by Todd Wilkinson? They sound alike, but the books could hardly be more different: You can't tell a book by its title.

The interface of science and public policy is like the demilitarized zone that divides the two Koreas: Enter at your own risk. From one side you will be dodging accusations of willful manipulation or downright distortion on behalf of a selfish, elitist, left-leaning green agenda. From the other you can expect assertions of similar manipulation and misrepresentation on behalf of right-wing ideologues, neoconservatives, and their corporate supporters. Whom is the concerned citizen to believe?

It's a good thing that book titles cannot be copyrighted. Or is it? The two books listed above, distinguished only by their subtitles, take wildly different views of our DMZ. The first, by a reasonably well-known shill for big industry, claims that environmentalists make up scare stories to frighten the public and the politicians and to enrich themselves and their organizations. Dioxins and most pesticides, for example, Fumento writes with a presumably straight face, aren't so bad after all. He and like-minded people have appropriated the phrase "junk science." It means, roughly, any science that doesn't lead to a conclusion they want to be led to. The present administration is a faithful devotee. For a flavor of this particular quackery, try going here.

Todd Wilkinson, by contrast, is a thorough, dispassionate journalist. His book, published in 1997, describes what has happened when politicians, in the service of extractive industries and other commercial enterprises, lean on the federal government's scientific agencies -- the Environmental Protection Agency, the Fish and Wildlife Service, and many others. The examples are legion and they are nonpartisan; neither political party has a monopoly on misusing or ignoring science.

Which brings us to the Bush administration. Readers wishing to delve deeply into this subject are encouraged to visit the website of the Union of Concerned Scientists, which in mid-2004 issued an exhaustive account of the administration's shameless misuse of science. For the purpose of this article, we shall concentrate on two lovely examples of this sort of chicanery, both coming to light in September 2004, well after the UCS report appeared.

The first concerns a robin-sized seabird called the marbled murrelet. It is unusual for a sea bird in that while it forages at sea, it nests inland, up to 30 miles from the coast. Murrelets are found in the Aleutian Islands and on the west coast of North America from the Alaska peninsula down through British Columbia and as far south as northern California.

The population of murrelets in Washington, Oregon, and northern California has been protected as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act since 1992, having lost too much ancient-forest habitat to logging.

In 2002, the American Forest Resource Council filed suit against the Fish and Wildlife Service for failing to conduct a review of the status of the murrelet, as the Endangered Species Act decrees should happen for listed species every five years. The stated goal of this suit was to push the agency to remove the murrelet from the protected list so the timber industry could resume logging in the birds' habitat.

The government, for the first time in memory, decided to hire outside experts to conduct the review. The motivation for this decision was not clear. The agency begged lack of resources and overwork, though skeptics wondered if pro-logging forces feared that agency scientists would opt for continued protection. Whatever the reason, the government engaged the services of EDAW, Inc., a huge consultancy with offices in, among other places, Seattle. EDAW assembled a team of biologists including many of the principal murrelet researchers in this country and Canada.

The key question in the status review was whether the listed murrelets -- the ones in Washington, Oregon, and California -- were a "distinct population segment," that is, not just an indistinguishable part of the overall population that lives on the Pacific Rim from California to the Aleutians. That this population of birds is in trouble was not in question -- studies indicate that all could disappear by the end of the century, and the likelihood that the California population would go extinct within 40 years without an abrupt reversal of fortune was 100 percent. The hopes of the timber industry must lie in a determination that they're all the same bird and that, therefore, the Lower-48 population could be obliterated with impunity since there were plenty of murrelets elsewhere.

The EDAW-Hamer review was finished in March 2004 and submitted to the Fish and Wildlife Service. It found that there are three "distinct population segments" of the marbled murrelet based on criteria we shall look at presently.

The regional office of the Fish and Wildlife Service received the report, digested its contents, and forwarded it to headquarters in Washington, DC, with the EDAW findings intact. Headquarters then asked the court for a four-month extension of its April deadline to consider the findings. Suspicious minds wondered what was up. The answer came in early September. At that moment, a final status review was issued with a dramatically different conclusion: the Lower-48 population of marbled murrelets was no longer to be considered a distinct population segment. The agency said it would continue to protect the species as threatened, but the facade was showing a potentially fatal crack. Delisting could be proposed any time, which could lead to increased logging and quick extinction.

Critics were up in arms, accusing the government of a gross perversion of science. And soon, support appeared from an unimpeachable source: Three of the status-review team assembled by EDAW sent a memorandum to Michael Milstein of the Portland Oregonian and Jeff Barnard of the Associated Press. In two pithy pages, they explained why the Lower-48 birds are a distinct population segment as defined by the Fish and Wildlife Service's own criteria.

Those criteria say that a population segment is discrete if there are distinct differences in behavior or biology on the one hand, or if it overlaps an international boundary where the governments involved vary in their approach to protection of the species.

These three biologists point out that there is considerable difference in the rate of mutations between the Aleutian and Californian populations of murrelets, that northern populations nest on the ground whereas the Lower-48 population nests exclusively in trees, and that there are variations in breeding and dispersal behavior among the different groups. On the second criterion, they point out that the Marbled Murrelet Recovery Plan in the U.S. calls for recovery of the species while across the border the Canadian Recovery Plan calls for a 30 percent decline in murrelet habitat and populations in British Columbia over the next 30 years.

The groups, in other words, are distinct and the Washington-Oregon-California segment should maintain its protection.

How this plays out remains to be seen, but it is crystal clear that administration functionaries had no compunction about sweeping "sound science" aside when it was convenient to do so, as The New York Times pointed out on September 14, 2004.

The second example has to do with salmon that return to spawn in the headwaters of the Snake River, also in the Pacific Northwest. These fish once returned in the millions each year, but hydroelectric dams -- in particular four on the lower Snake in eastern Washington, built in the 1960s and '70s -- have devastated those populations. A lengthy battle has been waged, with the government's own scientists conceding that removing (or breaching) the dams is the surest way to let the runs rebuild themselves. This concession came in biological opinions issued by the National Marine Fisheries Service (also known as NOAA Fisheries) in 1995 and again in 2000. The latter opinion was challenged in court on other grounds, and a judge ordered that it be rewritten. The rewrite was released in September 2004, and it once again turned science on its head.

The new opinion makes the astonishing argument that the dams are a fixed part of the river system -- like the riverbed, rapids, or shoreline -- and that therefore their existence need not be analyzed. Salmon restoration, the opinion states, will rely instead on new gadgets, though skeptics worry that these gadgets may not work. Where previous opinions said that dam breaching or removal would be considered if other measures don't work, the new opinion says -- as President Bush promised during his first campaign for president -- that the dams will never be removed, salmon -- and science -- be damned.

This opinion will be submitted to the federal judge who ordered it written in the first place, and he may or may not accept it. Either way, the new document is one more example or politics running roughshod over science.

Tom Turner, Senior Editor
yourturn@earthjustice.org