"In Fire's Wake, Logging Study Inflames Debate: University Study Challenges Cutting Of Burnt Timber" by Blaine Harden:
If fire ravages a national forest, as happened here in southwest Oregon when the Biscuit fire torched a half-million acres four years ago, the Bush administration believes loggers should move in quickly, cut marketable trees that remain and replant a healthy forest.An Oregon State University study of the fire in southwest Oregon found that logging after fire "has harmed forest recovery and increased fire risk". The study, published in Science, calls into question the scientific rationale behind a bill pending in Congress that would ease procedures for post-fire logging in federal forests.
"We must quickly restore the areas that have been damaged by fire," President Bush said in Oregon four years ago after touring damage from the Biscuit fire. He called it "common sense."
A couple of weeks after the Science article appeared and infuriated the forest industry, the federal Bureau of Land Management, which footed the bill for the study of the Biscuit fire, cut off the final year of the three-year, $300,000 grant. BLM officials said the authors violated their funding contract by attempting to influence legislation pending in Congress.The article concludes:
After the cutoff, Democrats in the Northwest congressional delegation complained about government censorship, academic freedom and the politicization of science in the Bush administration. Within a week, the BLM backed down and restored the grant.
One of the nation's best-known forest ecologists attempted to summarize the world's collective scientific knowledge on logging after fires. Jerry Franklin, a professor of ecosystem science at the University of Washington's College of Forest Resources, warned the hearing that Congress should be careful not to prescribe salvage logging as a cure-all for every forest fire.
Salvage logging and replanting can often succeed, Franklin said, if the intent is to turn a scorched landscape into a stand of trees for commercial harvest.
If, however, Congress wants to promote the ecologically sound recovery of burned federal forests, Franklin said, the overwhelming weight of scientific research suggests that "salvage logging is not going to be appropriate."
"Plan B Battles Embroil States: Proposals Mirror Red-Blue Divide" by Marc Kaufman.
Filling a void left by the Food and Drug Administration's inability to decide whether to make the "morning-after" pill available without a prescription, nearly every state is or soon will be wrestling with legislation that would expand or restrict access to the drug.Recall that the FDA refused to make a decision on the approval of the over the counter sale of the drug without prescription, a policy recommended for approval by its advisory process, then a leading scientist quit the agency in protest, and its Administrator resigned having apparently reneged on promises made during his confirmation hearing.
More than 60 bills have been filed in state legislatures already this year, and that follows an already busy 2005 session on emergency contraception. The resulting tug of war is creating an availability map for the pill that looks increasingly similar to the map of "red states" and "blue states" in the past two presidential elections -- with increased access in the blue states and greater restrictions in the red ones.
The Battlefields
It is important to realize that the Bush Administration is supportive of most science, and indeed has proposed a major increase in funding for science based on recommendations from leaders of the scientific and industrial communities. There is no fundamental disagreement about development of nanoscience and technology, information science, space technology, mathematics, physics, chemistry, or many other fields of science.
So what are the contentious issues?
The role of science in environmental policy: The core of the problem seems to be where business profits would be reduced by government regulatory action based on scientific evidence. The Bush Administration seems skeptical about the validity of such evidence, seems to apply the cautionary principle less vigorously than many scientists would prefer, and unfortunately seems to introduce political style invective in what I would prefer to be reasoned discourse.
Reproductive biology: The Administration, and many of its backers, oppose abortion. Policies preventing funding of organizations providing abortion or abortion advice have been put into place, and evidence from the social sciences suggesting caution with such policies is challenged strongly. The Administration has regulated against government spending on embryonic stem cell research, using faulty information to justify its regulation, and in spite of the fact that many embryos that could be used to try to generate new stem cell lines are simply destroyed each year. It seems to be militating against any research that would produce chimeras -- either animals with some inserted genes from humans or humans with some inserted genes from animals. All of these policies seem to be based on religious concepts. Scientists hold that some of the prohibited research would be scientifically valuable, potentially contributing to development of useful medical technologies, and many hold that now prohibited studies would be ethically acceptable.
The teaching of evolution: Many who believe in literal interpretations of the bible seek that science teaching in the public schools be limited in any area that they see as challenging biblical teachings. The past conflict over the teaching of creationism, and the current one over teaching intelligent design as alternative theories to evolution are the hottest issues. Note, however, that there is a long history of these issues including cosmology and gradualism in geology.
International cooperation: This is a more complicated issue, but on a number of occasions the Administration has concerned or even angered scientists by actions that have restricted international travel. After 9/11 the slowdown in granting of visas for graduate education in the United States, and for scientific exchanges is of special concern. Members of the Administration have also sought to limit participation of U.S. scientists in international meetings and institutions, and indeed it is charged to substitute political criteria for scientific criteria in the appointment of advisors to the international scientific bodies.
Political versus scientific judgment: There is a line between where scientific judgment is considered to dominate and where political judgment leads. Basically, scientists should judge the evidence on matters of fact, political processes should dominate to balance the values involved. Thus the Congress allocates funds among the National Institutes of Health, but no research project is funded unless approved by a scientific review committee. The National Science Foundation is so named to symbolize the high importance of scientific to political judgment in its decision making. In two areas, the placement of this line has been especially of concern to the scientific community during this Administration: appointments and earmarking. The Administration clearly has the right and the authority to appoint its people to policy making positions in government agencies, but there is concern that in some cases the appointees have not had the appropriate professional qualifications. The number of projects with budgets earmarked by Congress, bypassing the normal scientific review process has increase markedly in recent years.
Other areas: Some have seen the scientific battles as a subset of battles in a larger "war on expertise". I suppose that one might focus more on the social sciences, and question whether the Administration is drawing appropriately on economic knowledge for its economic policies, or on knowledge from sociology, anthropology and political science for its prosecution of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and its promotion of democracy. But I think the five general areas described above provide a potentially useful framework for discussion.
There is an important and useful place for ideology, and there are clearly limits to scientific knowledge and rational decision making. Not only don't we know enough to always base policy and decisions on evidence, but we don't seem to be able to handle very complex decision making very well, and of course, the economics of decision making often recommend routine or non-analytic processes.
Moreover, as Voltaire said, "the ideal is the enemy of the good". It is often more important to get a policy or program that is adequate, by a political process that is acceptable to all, than to insist on a program that is more fully based on evidence and scientific judgment.
But the United States has a history in its international negotiations of arguing for more rational decisions, and opposing approaches of other nations that we judged excessively ideological. In the aftermath of 9/11 this position seems especially imperative for security reasons, but I believe more rationality also to be critically important in international economic and social development. Poor countries and poor people simply need to make better decisions on how to use their scarce resources and how to confront their pressing problems. I hate to see the United States assuming a more ideological position and thus undermining its important role as an advocate of evidence based policy and decision making.
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