Scientists Caught in Fraud

from DiscerningToday.org:

Outright Fraud and Religious Zealousness
Government scientists are not above actually planting evidence to support their anti-human beliefs. In the fall of 2001 the U.S. Forest Service found that seven federal and state wildlife biologists planted false evidence of a rare and threatened Canadian lynx in the Wenatchee and Gifford Pinchot National Forests in the state of Washington. The three U.S. Forest Service, two U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and two Washington State Department of Fish and Wildlife employees planted lynx fur on rubbing posts. The posts were installed to identify existence of the creatures in the two national forests as part of a lynx habitat study started in 1999. DNA testing of two of the samples matched that of a lynx living inside an animal preserve. The third DNA sample matched that of an escaped pet lynx being held in a federal office until its owner retrieved it.

Had the fraud gone undetected it would have closed roads to vehicles. They would have banned off-road vehicles, snowmobiles, skis and snowshoes, along with livestock grazing and tree thinning. Representatives Richard Pombo (R-California) and John Peterson (R-Pennsylvania), the chair communications chairman, respectively, of the House Western Caucus, were especially critical of the incident in a jointly released statement:
As Americans, we should have been astounded by the recent findings that federal officials intentionally planted hair from the threatened Canadian lynx in our national forests in order to impose sweeping land regulations. But in truth, many of us who come from rural America have grown accustomed to environmental activism prevailing over the rule of law and over the best interests of families and communities.

The guilty employees claimed they were not really trying to manipulate or expand the lynx habitat, but instead were merely testing the lab's ability to identify the cat species through DNA analysis. They did not come forward, however, until after a fellow Forest Service colleague had exposed them. “That would be like bank robbers taking money from a bank and saying they were just testing the security of a bank, they weren't really stealing the money,” said Rob Gordon, executive director of the National Wilderness Institute. Nonetheless, the story given by the seven guilty biologists prevailed, and the guilty parties received no discipline — thereby encouraging more fraud in the future. Representatives Pombo and Peterson were aghast: “This lackadaisical approach to willful, unethical conduct is unacceptable, and we see no credible alternative other than to terminate the parties if there is convincing evidence that they knowingly and willingly planted unauthorized samples.”
Retired Fish and Wildlife Service biologist James M. Beers called the false sampling amazing but not very surprising. “I'm convinced that there is a lot of that going on for so-called higher pur­poses,” he said. The higher purpose to which Beers referred is known as “conservation biology.” Untested, conservation biology rests on the unproven pantheistic assumption that nature knows best and that all human use and activity should follow natural patterns within relatively homogenous soil-vegetation-hydrology landscapes called ecosystems. Such belief holds that the government should not permit unnatural human develop­ment like roads, and activities snowmobiling, livestock grazing and harvesting. Furthermore, ecosystems cross unnatural property lines. Since conservation biology ostensibly calls for holistic manage­ment of entire ecosystems to protect its perceived fragile web of life, the rights of nature must be superior to the rights of people, including their property rights.
The religious zealousness driving the ESA has gotten so bad that David Stirling, Vice-president of the Pacific Legal Foundation, a conservative legal foundation taking cases that have Constitutional merit, notes:
For three decades, environmental purists have actively promoted the pantheistic notion that plant and animal life rank higher on the species hierarchy than people. Their "return-to-the-wild" agenda argues that human life activities are the enemy of plant and animal species, and only through their efforts to halt growth and shut down people’s normal and necessary life endeavors will Mother Earth smile again. From as far away as the paved-over streams and erstwhile species habitat of Manhattan, a recent New York Times editorial called for farmers in the Klamath Basin to turn their land back to nature.

David Graber, Research Biologist with the National Park Service, graphically expresses this radical view:
Human happiness, and certainly human fecundity, are not as important as a wild and healthy planet. I know social scientists who remind me that people are part of nature, but that isn’t true. Somewhere along the line — at about a million years ago, maybe half of that — we quit the contract and became a cancer. We have become a plague upon ourselves and upon the Earth…. Until such time as Homo Sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along. Conservation biology is little more than earth worship, seasoned with a little science.