The House Natural Resources Committee held a hearing on “Endangered Species Act Implementation: Science or Politics?”
Rep. Don Young's Prepared Statement
Mr. Chairman, the hearing today is called "
While that may make a great headline, I afraid it is a little more complicated than that. First of all, anyone who tells you that "science" provides just one correct answer is seriously mistaken. Get 10 scientists in the same room and ask them a question about the decline of a species and they will probably come up with several different theories. Let me repeat that – you'll get theories. Science is not infallible nor are the answers to scientific questions clear cut.
The title of the hearing also implies that scientists do not and cannot have biases or pre-conceived notions about their area of expertise. Again, this is flat out wrong. Scientists, just like everybody else, have biases which can affect their work.
Let's look back at the Steller sea lion debate as an example. Under the Clinton Administration, and because of court action, the Steller sea lion was listed as endangered. Despite 39 determinations by the expert agency and based on the advice of scientists that commercial fishing did not cause jeopardy to Steller sea lion populations, it was decided that we should limit the commercial harvest because now one scientist thought it was the cause of the decline.
Of course, the scientist who wrote the biological opinion was a marine mammal biologist. But his expertise was not Steller sea lions. His expertise was another type of pinniped – Hawaiian Monk seals. But I guess if you know about seals in warm water areas like
Well, this scientist apparently had a few personal views on what he wanted to do in this case. Such strongly held views, as it turns out, that he refused to share the draft Biological Opinion with his supervisor, also a scientist, and ran back to
The Biological Opinion raised a whole slew of possible causes of the decline – predation by killer whales, disease, toxic substances, entanglement in marine debris, commercial harvest of Stellers (yes, Japan had a culling program), subsistence harvest, natural environmental change, quality of available prey, etc.
It also listed a number of "Reasonable and Prudent Alternatives" (RPAs) to minimize the harm to Steller sea lions. Impressively enough, the same "scientist" who wrote the Biological Opinion wrote the RPAs. Interestingly, he wrote the RPAs – restrictions only on the fishing industry – before he finished the Biological Opinion. Did he have an unbiased, "scientific" viewpoint? And all of the RPAs were based on the hypothesis that fishing was the cause of the decline.
One of the RPAs was to increase the size of the no-trawl zones around rookeries and haulouts (even haulouts that hadn't been in used in years according to the scientists) from three miles to 10 miles. And this was done without the scientists ever coming to the conclusion that the no-trawl zones had any affect on the recovery of the Steller sea lion. They just didn't know. There was no scientific evidence that the no-trawl zones worked, because they had never tried to figure out whether they worked. But I'm sure there was no politics or bias involved in those decisions. It probably just sounded good, so why not.
The rest of the RPAs, again written by a Hawaiian Monk seal biologist who had little if any history in Alaska or with Alaskan fisheries, would have undone more than 10 years worth of fishery and habitat conservation measures. The RPAs could have pushed vessels into areas that had been avoided because of habitat concerns. It could have pushed vessels into areas that had been avoided because of bycatch concerns. These RPAs did not take into account any of the existing fishery management provisions. Why not? Because the marine mammal scientists didn't feel the need to talk to the fisheries biologists within the same agency. One scientist didn't want to talk to another scientist in another field who might have added some very valuable information to the equation.
At what point do policy makers need to step in and referee the scientists? At what point do the policy makers need to make decisions on how human activities need to be modified to help animals recover? At what point do policy makers need to assess the uncertainty of the science on an animals' biology or life cycle needs and make decisions that affect people's lives and livelihoods?
Now I am not naive. There is always going to be a political aspect to the management of endangered and threatened species. When you are requiring industries to change their operations to minimize the impact on species and you don't really know what is causing the decline of the species, there is going to have to be someone who makes decisions. In the case of the Steller sea lion, a single biologist drove the decisions and they made the wrong ones. The National Academy of Sciences did a review a few years later and one of their conclusions as to the cause of the decline was that other theories deserved equal consideration.
Finally, Mr. Chairman, if we really want scientists to be the last and best decision makers on endangered species questions, then why do groups continue to run to the courts to get the court to substitute its judgment over the scientists and the policy makers. Courts should not manage fisheries, they should not manage endangered species and they should not be put in the position to make scientific decisions. And let's not pretend that this Administration is the first one to make policy decisions on endangered species when the science does not give them only one alternative.
Stay tuned!
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