When forests burn, part 2

Russell Sadler

When last we peeked into the hallowed, ivy-covered halls at Oregon State’s College of Forestry, we stumbled onto an faculty food fight in the cafeteria of ideas. The fight pitted old-guard foresters and forest engineers against younger forest ecologists.

Faculty heavyweights John Sessions and Mike Newton were demanding that the journal Science delay the publication of the results of a study by OSU graduate student Daniel Donato and five other OSU and Forest Service scientists. Dean Hal Salwasser was publicly apologizing for any part he played in the effort to suppress Donato’s Science article. Donato’s study reached different conclusions than a recent study by Newton and Sessions on the effects of salvage logging on forest regeneration after the 2002 Biscuit Burn in Southern Oregon.

What was a minor skirmish of bruised academic egos suddenly became a major battle in the “Republican War against Science,” when the Bureau of Land Management, with all the subtlety and finesse we have come to expect from that agency, immediately announced it had frozen its funding of Donato’s work. No hearings, no inquiry. Just no more money.

The reason? Donato apparently “violated research protocols” and was trying to “influence legislation” by briefly mentioning Oregon Congressman Greg Walden’s Healthy Forests Restoration Act which would permit more aggressive salvage logging of wildfire sites.

Of course Donato was trying to influence legislation. So were Sessions and Newton. Publicly owned natural resources are managed by public bodies. Public bodies act by legislation. Virtually every scientific study published is designed to influence legislation one way or another.

Congressman Walden is brandishing the Sessions-Newton study like an amulet because it supports more aggressive salvage logging after fires. Donato’s study is politically inconvenient because it says aggressive salvage logging can actually hinder natural regeneration.

The BLM’s excuse for freezing Donato’s funding was so transparently political that the agency promptly restored the money after Washington Congressman Jay Inslee demanded an investigation to determine whether the motive for freezing Donato’s funds was a desire "to punish researchers for reporting findings that are unpopular with the administration."

Journalist Chris Mooney, in his revealing book “The Republican War on Science,” observes that conservatives do not like science because scientists’ work often contradicts conservative ideological goals.

That is why the former pesticide applicator turned congressman, Tom DeLay, insists global warming is “globaloney,” despite substantial scientific evidence to the contrary.

Congressman Greg Walden insists on giving land management agencies new power to log and replant forests ravaged by fires, floods and other natural disasters just at a time when forest research, is beginning to show that aggressive human intervention like salvage logging may actually hinder natural forest regeneration. It is no longer enough for conservatives to buy scientists willing to support their ideas in the face of evidence to the contrary. In this age of slash and burn politics, scientists with inconvenient views must be demonized and discredited. Hence the attacks on Donato and his group’s research and nasty criticism of the peer review process the journal Science used before publishing the results of Donato’s work.

Peer review is the sciences’ time honored way of creating a jury to weigh scientific work before it is published for further criticism. Steven Pinker, the Harvard psychologist who wrote “The Language Instinct” describes peer review succinctly.

“The success of science depends on an apparatus of democratic adjudication -- anonymous peer review, open debate, the fact that a graduate student can criticize a tenured professor. These mechanisms are more or less explicitly designed to counter human self-deception. People always think they’re right, and powerful people will tend to use their authority to bolster their prestige and suppress inconvenient opposition. You try to set up the game of science so that the truth will out this ugly side of human nature.”

Politics, of course, is the opposite of science. Politics thrives on self-deception. Its practitioners are people who think they are right and use their authority to bolster their prestige and suppress inconvenient opposition. That is why Idaho Sen. Larry Craig can slip a rider into an appropriations bill and eliminate funding for the Fish Passage Center simply because the scientists who work there counted the fish passing the Columbia Dams in a way Craig finds
inconvenient.

If Oregon State University and it’s College of Forestry did not enjoy the reputation and credibility it has acquired over the years, it could have been a victim of the Republican War On Science just as surely as the Fish Passage Center.

I suspect the quick restoration of BLM’s funding of Donato’s work means that Congressman Walden belatedly realizes just how close this incident comes to permanently damaging OSU’s academic reputation and how troubled his constituents would be if that actually happens.

By Russell Sadler Feb. 12, 2006