Debunking Lynxgate (Cont.)

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Outside Magazine, April 2002

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Debunking Lynxgate (Cont.)

Mitch Wainwright and the other alleged conspirators, whose names were blacked out of the private investigator's report, could do nothing but sit tight as a maelstrom began to rage around them. Interior Secretary Gale Norton and Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman, who oversee Fish and Wildlife and the Forest Service respectively, each put their Office of Inspector General on the case. A congressional hearing was scheduled for February 28. But while Wainwright declined to discuss specifics, citing the investigation, he flatly denies the conspiracy charges.

"There was no collusion," he says, "no agenda."

The strangest thing about the so-called planted fur samples is the assumption that saws and snowmobiles will fall silent wherever lynx are discovered. In fact, there are virtually no cases in which the presence of lynx has changed management policies. Lynx certainly didn't stop the Forest Service from approving the Vail ski area's planned expansion into what Colorado state biologists considered prime lynx habitat on the White River National Forest.

When presented with this fact, Marnie Funk, a spokeswoman for Hansen's committee, would only refer back to the private investigator's findings. "There is clearly no smoking gun in that report," she allows. "But there are unanswered questions." She declined to elaborate, citing the pending congressional investigation, except to add that the biologists' use of unauthorized control samples was "a questionable way to conduct a study." Wainwright acknowledges that he erred by not following the chain of command. "We did things wrong," he says, citing their failure to clear the control samples with the head of the lynx program. (The biologists' immediate supervisors were aware of the control samples.) The small point is well taken, but the bigger picture here should give pause to anyone concerned over how easily politics trumps science inside the Beltway.

"Anything endangered-species related is now being called into question," says Eric Wingerter, national field director for Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, a green-tilted group that includes federal land managers. And the conservative press rushed to provide those critics with a soapbox: "The tendency of true believers," sniffed an opinion piece in The Weekly Standard, "is to defend any means to their end. "Indeed, post-Lynxgate, some lawmakers have called for a review of an unrelated federal grizzly-bear research program, while others are rehashing dubious stories that federal biologists faked data that touched off the spotted-owl wars of the eighties. "The people with the agenda aren't the biologists," says Wingerter. "And the biologists are scared to death."

For his part, Forest Service scientist Mitch Wainwright, who is now working on timber-sale evaluations, does plead guilty—"of naïveté." But as for charges that he and his colleagues were engaged in a crusade, he is emphatic. "Nothing," he says, "could be further from the truth."

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