|
Last Updated:
Feb 24th, 2006 - 16:04:09
Affiliates
Powells.com
Favorite Links
American Friends Service Committee
Friends Committee on National Legislation
National Catholic Reporter
British Broadcasting Company
The Guardian
Christian Science Monitor
LA Times
SF Gate
Oregonian
The Register Guard
Environmental News Network
Sojourners
Orion
Swans Commentary
Federation of American Scientists
Car Free Times
Indy Media
AlterNet.org
Common Dreams
The Nation
Utne Reader
Eugene Weekly
Willamette Week
Portland Tribune
Bitter Lemons.org
The Travels of our First Webmaster
|
|
|
Voices of the Northwest
Sadler's Sense: Peer Review and Politics
In this age of slash and burn politics, scientists with inconvenient views must be demonized and discredited.
By Russell Sadler
Posted on Feb 10, 2006 |
Email this article
Printer friendly page
|
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.
Copyright ©2006 by Russell Sadler
Russell Sadler is a journalist and a lecturer at Southern Oregon University. You may write him c/o publisher at westbynorthwest.org. Visit Sadler's Sense column's at West By Northwest.org:
Sadler's Sense: Of Forests and The River
Sadler's Sense: Development and Belief --Who Pays?
Sadler's Sense: Time Out of Mind
Sadler's Sense: Draining America First Oil Policy Inadequate to the Energy Challenge
Sadler's Sense: Holly, Folly and Why Its Ok to Cut Christmas Trees
Sadler's Sense: We Need the Constitutional Limits of the Initiative Process
Sadler's Sense: Learning from the Katrina Moment
Sadler's Sense: A Right to Die?
Sadler's Sense: Who Are These Candidates Representing?
Sadler's Sense: The Birth Tax
Sadler's Sense: The Thin Veneer
Sadler's Sense: Gas Policy After Katrina-- Oregon Can Lead the Way Again
Sadler's Sense: Oregon's Supreme Court Take on "Takings" Flies on Eagle Wings
Sadler's Sense: Legislature's Sandbox Politics Irresponsible
Sadler's Sense: Beyond Dorchester - Can Our Traditional Parties Stand for Anything Substantive?
Sadler's Sense: The Oregon Gasoline Tax, Pork Barrel Projects and Big Brother
Sadler's Sense: A Classic Conservative Judge Who Conserves the Law
Sadler's Sense: On the Economic Ramparts--The Northwest, Defazio and CAFTA
Sadler's Sense: Can Dissatisfaction Become a Wave for Political Sanity?
Sadler's Sense: Oregon's Public Lands Patrimony in Danger Once Again
Sadler's Sense: Driving a Road to State Religion?
Sadler's Sense: Remembering Roy Lieuallen and his Legacy
Sadler's Sense: The Big Sky Game: Manufacturers, Airlines and Competing Visions
Sadler's Sense: On Death: Our Challenged Autonomy
Sadler's Sense: Who Is in Charge of the State's Purse?
Sadler's Sense: The Risks of Shifting Higher Ed.'s Costs and Who Pays
Sadler's Sense: The Good Ship School Finance Is Sinking
Sadler's Sense: Infrastructure Renewal Needed
Sadler's Sense: The Unlikely Poster Child for Measure 37
Sadler's Sense: Of Myths, Money and Machines, Why We Blame the Owl
Sadler's Sense: Not Window Dressing
Sadler's Sense: From Constantine to George, God's Will and Secular Power
Sadler's Sense: Credibility or State of Our State
Sadler's Sense: Look in the Mirror, Oregon
Sadler's Sense: Why We Must Pay the Piper Now
Sadler's Sense: A Short History of Measure 30
© Copyright 2000-2004 by West By Northwest.org
Top of Page
untitled
|
|
|
