Here is a blurb from the book's website:
‘Crusading environmentalists won’t like this book. Nor will George W. Bush. Its potential market lies between these extremes. It explores the hijacking of science by people grinding axes on behalf of noble causes. “Noble cause corruption” is a term invented by the police to justify fitting up people they “know” to be guilty, but for whom they can’t muster forensic evidence that would satisfy a jury. Kellow demonstrates convincingly, and entertainingly, that this form of corruption can be found at the centre of most environmental debates. Highly recommended reading for everyone who doesn’t already know who is guilty.’
– John Adams, University College London, UK
Science and Public Policy
by Aynsley Kellow
Web link: http://www.e-elgar.com/Bookentry_Main.lasso?id=12839
Normally £59.95/$110.00 Special price $40/£25 + postage and packing
To order this book please email (with full credit card details and address):
sales@e-elgar.co.uk, or on our website enter 'Kellowoffer' in the special
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will be taken off when the order is processed.
Contents:
Preface
1. The Political Ecology of Pseudonovibos Spiralis and the Virtuous Corruption of Virtual Science
2. The Political Ecology of Conservation Biology
3. Climate Science as ‘Post-normal’ Science
4. Defending the Litany: The Attack on The Skeptical Environmentalist
5. Sound Science and Political Science
6. Science and its Social and Political Context
Bibliography
Index
26 comments:
Perhaps Kellow's book is excellent. I'll never know because after reading some Amazon.com excerpts, I can't take the book seriously. I know the subject matter of the excerpts intimately as I am the subject.
Kellow relies upon a secondary source (Alton Chase's "In a Dark Wood") to claim that a demographic analysis of the northern spotted owl was bogus. Kellow omits any science from his discussion. He also omits law (somehow Kellow is right and over a dozen federal judges during a 10-year period were wrong) and public policy (White House administrations from Clinton to Bush re-affirmed spotted owl habitat protection).
Kellow also exhumes the discredited "lynx hair" issue, which even the Washington Times (source of the original "expose") abandoned after its marketing staff tried to extort advertising revenue from me to rebut the paper's bogus reporting.
On the other hand, Kellow did get my name right.
As with Hulme's book as discussed here, I'd prefer a chance to look at it before we can discuss it.. how about we meet here in a month and take up this discussion?
-2-Sharon F.
With a quorum (N >= 2), I am happy to host a book club on this book when participants are ready!
Noble cause corruption is a term invented by the police? To describe their own corruption?
Since when do public officials coin high-falutin' terms to describe their own crimes? Makes no sense to me.
Aynsely Kellow sends by email this response to Andy Stahl for posting, Part 1:
"I can fully appreciate that Andy Stahl might be a little sensitive about being included as a (very minor) player in my book, but he really needs to provide evidence to support his pleas of innocence.
Let’s Take his first claim:
‘Kellow relies upon a secondary source (Alton Chase's "In a Dark Wood") to claim that a demographic analysis of the northern spotted owl was bogus.
Kellow omits any science from his discussion. He also omits law (somehow Kellow is right and over a dozen federal judges during a 10-year period were wrong) and public policy (White House administrations from Clinton to Bush
re-affirmed spotted owl habitat protection).’
As readers can see from the relevant passage (below), I make no claim that the Lande paper was ‘bogus’ – simply that it relied upon modelling rather than observation (which is the theme of the book). Did Andy Stahl NOT play
the role of midwife that Chase describes? If so, please provide some evidence. I note also his rather interesting jurisprudence, that ‘a dozen federal judges can’t be wrong’. (I guess we can close down the appeals court system, then). Did they rule on the point I make about virtual science, or are you making the logical leap that, because they upheld later decisions,
anything that happened earlier must be fine?
The passage is:
Demographer Russell Lande was drafted by the campaigners in the Pacific Northwest to produce a scientific paper establishing that logging would harm the spotted owl (Lande, 1988). Lande knew little of birds, and had apparently never seen a spotted owl, but he applied a mathematical model derived from the effects of pesticide on insect populations to the spotted
owl problem. This was consummate virtual science, with mathematical models supplanting observational data, or even conservation biology. Activist Andy Stahl put Lande in touch with scholars who suppled the data, and then helped find peer reviewers willing to write supporting letters (Chase, 1995: 256-7). This was necessary because the only ‘science’ then available on the spotted owl was an incomplete doctoral dissertation. The Lande paper was
created to suit the political campaign and was used together with the notion of precaution to win the day. Whereas it assumed an owl population of 2,500 and further assumed that logging old-growth forest would cause its
extinction, subsequent research showed the species was far more numerous and, if anything, preferred regrowth forest. Regrowth forest provided more prey and more conducive hunting conditions than old-growth forest.
Andy Stahl: Please tell me which part is not true.
Paper cited:
Lande, R. (1988) ‘Demographic Models of the Northern Spotted Owl (Strix occidentalis caurina) Oecologia (Berlin) 75: 601-60"
Part II:
"As for his second claim:
‘Kellow also exhumes the discredited "lynx hair" issue, which even the ashington Times (source of the original "expose") abandoned after its marketing staff tried to extort advertising revenue from me to rebut the
paper's bogus reporting.’
What earthly connection is there between The Washington Times and its claimed extortion? At what point do if use anything that the Times might have printed? I rely exclusively on Nature and the WSJ and CSM.
Again, please provide reason and evidence that any of this is wrong, Andy tahl. (I don’t expect that you would agree with my opinion that your credibility might have been a little strained).
The relevant passage is:
Those who wish to use endangered species legislation as a trump card in environmental politics do not always leave the presence of a suitable species to chance, or even to modeling. A worrying example was the apparent
planting by US Federal Fish and Wildlife Department officers of fur from
endangered (at least in the US) Canadian lynx in Wenatchee and Gifford
Pinchot National Forests in the Pacific Northwest in 2002. When found out,
the officials claimed that they were merely trying to test the reliability
of testing methods, by covertly seeing whether the testing laboratories
could identify real lynx fur if not told in advance. Critics suspected the
samples had been planted in an effort to protect the national forests from
logging, mining and recreation. The Executive Director of the Forest Service
Employees for Environmental Ethics termed this response ‘a witch hunt in
search of a false conspiracy’ (Wilkinson, 2002). It was, he claimed, ‘really
about well-intentioned scientists trying to make sure a process works
properly but who got caught crosswise by political actors who took what
happened and twisted it.’ The critics, led by Republican Chair of the House
Resources Committee James V. Hansen, were viewed by ‘some environmentalists’
as leading an attempt to discredit legitimate wildlife research, the
conclusions of which sometimes clashed with the interests of mining and
logging interests. The problem for the credibility of Forest Service
Employees for Environmental Ethics was that their Executive Director was
Andy Stahl, the very same person who had arranged the creation of the
spotted owl paper. His claim that ‘At no time was there any attempt made by
the scientists to fabricate a lynx presence’ would hardly have been
convincing to sceptics."
Part III:
"Nature editorialised in support of those who had faked evidence of Canadian
lynx, labelling the critics a ‘lynch mob’ (Nature, 2002; Dalton, 2002), and
was quickly taken to task (Mills, 2002) for supporting this unjustified
planting of samples by a researcher involved in this project and another
project, the integrity of which was impugned by the fakery (Schwartz et al,
2002). The Forest Service had in 1998 contracted John Weaver who worked for
the environmental group the Wildlife Conservation Society. He had reported
lynx hair in both Oregon and Washington in areas where nobody expected them.
These results were used in a Forest Service application for listing the lynx
as an endangered species, but the samples were later found to be from
bobcats and coyotes. Further evidence could not be found, so in the 1999 and
2000 survey seasons seven employees sent in samples labelled as wild lynx.
While they claimed to be testing the laboratory, they were discovered only
because a fellow employee blew the whistle the day before he retired
(Strassel, 2002).
Sources cited:
Dalton, Rex (2002) ‘Fur flies over lynx survey’s suspect samples.’ Nature.
415: 107.
Mills, L. Scott (2002) ‘False samples are not the same as blind controls.’
Nature 415: 417.
Mills, L. Scott (2002) ‘False samples are not the same as blind controls.’
Nature 415: 417.
Schwartz, Michael K., L. Scott Mills, Kevin. S. McKelvey. Leonard F.
Ruggiero & Fred W. Allendorf (2002) ‘DNA reveals high dispersal
synchronizing the population dynamics of Canada lynx.’ Nature 415: 520-522.
Strassel, Kimberley A. (2002) ‘The Missing Lynx’ Wall Street Journal 24
January.
Wilkinson, Todd ‘Catfight ensues over case of lynx fur planted in forests’
Christian Science Monitor 10 January 2002.
www.csmonitor.com/2002/0110/p2s2-uspo
(Accessed 11 January 2002).
Perhaps Andy Stahl would do better to actually read the book, see the
context of the passages he is cited in, and reflect critically on its
arguments."""
Your promoting the gang from E&E, Roger? Again?
I read the Pseudonovibos chapter and almost fell out of my chair.
Part I: Had Professor Kellow asked, I would have explained to him as follows:
1) “Demographer Russell Lande was drafted by the campaigners in the Pacific Northwest to produce a scientific paper establishing that logging would harm the spotted owl (Lande, 1988).” I asked Lande to assess the adequacy of the Forest Service's owl protection plan, which was based upon a genetic analysis of inbreeding depression. At no time did I ask Lande to show that logging harms spotted owls. Nor did he do so.
2) “Lande knew little of birds, and had apparently never seen a spotted owl, but he applied a mathematical model derived from the effects of pesticide on insect populations to the spotted owl problem.” Lande knew a lot about bird conservation. He had not seen a spotted owl. So what? My dad, molecular biologist Frank Stahl, has never "seen" the DNA code, but that doesn't make him less of a geneticist. Theoretical physicists have never "seen" quarks, but they are the subject of much study. The arithmetic Lande used was derived from differential equations (Levins had previously used the same math to assess insect metapopulation response to insecticides).
3) “This was consummate virtual science, with mathematical models supplanting observational data, or even conservation biology.” Lande used real data in his analysis, including data on owl birth and death rates, home range size, and juvenile dispersal distances. I don’t know what Kellow means by “supplanting . . . conservation biology.” The mathematics Lande applied to spotted owl data have become a standard conservation biology tool. Lande’s contribution earned him a MacArthur Foundation Fellows award.
4) “Activist Andy Stahl put Lande in touch with scholars who supplied the data, and then helped find peer reviewers willing to write supporting letters.” Lande’s analysis was published in Oecologia, an anonymously peer-reviewed scientific journal (I had no role in the publication process). Lande contacted the biologists who had spotted owl data and received those data directly from them; I played no role in that exchange. To independently assure myself that Lande’s analysis was on sound footing, I asked several scientists (e.g., George Barrowclough at the American Museum of Natural History) for their views on Lande’s work before releasing it to the public. To the best of my knowledge, those reviewers were not among the anonymous scientists who reviewed the Oecologia publication.
5) “This was necessary because the only ‘science’ then available on the spotted owl was an incomplete doctoral dissertation.” Lande’s analysis was in 1984. The dissertation, by Eric Forsman, who studied the owl’s natural history, was completed in 1980. Several spotted owl mark-recapture demographic studies were on-going by 1984 throughout the owl’s range.
Part II:
6) “The Lande paper was created to suit the political campaign and was used together with the notion of precaution to win the day.” The 1978 and 1984 U.S. Forest Service spotted owl analyses claimed the owl’s viability would be assured by protecting 5% of the owl’s remaining old-forest habitat. Lande’s analysis showed the government’s plan had significant shortcomings. Thus, we sued. We won. For those wanting a detailed explication of this ancient history (these events occurred 20+ years ago), I recommend Steve Yaffee’s “The Wisdom of the Spotted Owl: Policy Lessons For A New Century.” Our legal victories included half-a-dozen at the district court level and a similar number in federal appeals court. For those wishing to learn more about the spotted owl litigation, I recommend law professor Michael Blumm's "Ancient Forests, Spotted Owls, and Modern Public Land Law" (http://www.nationalaglawcenter.org/assets/bibarticles/blumm_ancient.pdf).
7) “Whereas it assumed an owl population of 2,500 and further assumed that logging old-growth forest would cause its extinction, subsequent research showed the species was far more numerous and, if anything, preferred regrowth forest.” The northern spotted owl is now extirpated in British Columbia where it survives only in a captive breeding program. The spotted owl’s population range-wide decline continues at a 3-4% annual pace (see Anthony, et al., “Status and Trends in Demography of Northern Spotted Owls, 1985–2003” – an up-dated version of this analysis with 5 more years of data is in press with no improvement in the owl’s disposition apparent).
8) “Regrowth forest provided more prey and more conducive hunting conditions than old-growth forest.” The owl is adapted to old forest conditions under several fire regimes, including infrequent stand-replacing fires typical in the north half to frequent, low-intensity, stand-thinning fires more common in the southern half's mixed-aged forests. What is constant, however, is the presence of old (> 100 years) trees in the owl's home range nesting and roosting areas.
As for the lynx hair episode, Kellow swallowed hook-line-and-sinker the right-wing led attack on scientists who were doing nothing more than ensuring the integrity of a genetics testing laboratory through the use of blind samples. The Sun Myung Moon-owned Washington Times (to those in Australia who may be unfamiliar with this rag, it makes Fox News look like journalism) led the assault against the lynx scientists with six feature stories and several editorials that sought to paint the biologists as zealots conspiring to lock up federal land from commercial use. All subsequent articles on the topic, e.g., the “Nature and the WSJ and CSM” stories Kellow relies upon, were responses or follow-ups to the Times’ “investigative” reporting. Had Kellow dug a little further, he would have discovered that the Washington Times backed away from its own reporting after it was revealed that the Times tried to sell advertising space to rebut its own lynx stories. As reported by the Washington Post: “Washington Times Managing Editor Fran Coombs says the issue is no longer ‘a black and white thing’ . . .” http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A18447-2002Feb3?language=printer. With this revelation, anti-environmental Congressional Republicans immediately dropped their own lynx hair investigation, promptly canceling a planned hearing. The lynx hair episode was relegated to the trash heap of failed conservative vendettas against scientists.
In sum, the proper time to have asked me “which part is not true” was 2007, before Kellow published his book. Checking sources and facts before publication distinguishes serious scholarship from popularized polemic.
As a population geneticist and former director of a genetics lab, I have my own opinions about the lynx issue. But I will wait until I have read the book.
Part 1:
It seems Andy Stahl operates in a universe where the genetic fallacy is non-existent, where something should be dismissed because it was reported on in a newspaper that has the wrong political allegiance. Such closed-mindedness was once described by the late Mary Douglas in terms of information needing to wear the correct badge of loyalty in order to be acceptable. Andy Stahl might be interested to know that, were he to actually read my book, I discuss the beliefs he exhibits and some length, at attempt to explain them.
In amongst the logical fallacies and rhetorical flourishes, such as invoking his father (who I would bet did rely on observations — albeit indirect through electron microscopes, X-ray diffusion, and the like — rather than the elegance of his models) Andy Stahl does present some interesting facts. Even if we were to accept his version of events, rather than that of Alston Chase.
1. He confirms that he drafted Lande to conduct the research.
2. He confirms that Lande had no experience with the Spotted Owl. Crucially, he does not dispute the statement that ‘Lande knew little of birds, and had apparently never seen a spotted owl, but he applied a mathematical model derived from the effects of pesticide on insect populations to the spotted owl problem.’ Were he to read my book, he might find that this very short section in which he features is part of an extensive critique of the use of such models by ecologists – too often generated inductively from data against which they are then ‘tested’. At no stage did I state Lande did not use data; indeed, I stated ‘Andy Stahl put Lande in touch with scholars who supplied the data’.
3. Lande’s work was circulated for discussion among the population from which any future referees for publication would be drawn. Even if we accept Andy Stahl’s version of events, the principles of anonymous peer review had been violated because those likely to be asked to assess it would likely be familiar with both the paper itself and the political context in which it was generated. His version of events shows four years elapsed between Lande conducting his analysis (1984) and publication (1988).
4. Andy Stahl also states that the Forest Service analysis that first provoked the controversy over the Spotted Owl was published in 1978 – two years prior to the completion of Eric Forsman’s thesis. Stahl reports that several studies were under way by 1984. Regardless of when Stahl briefed Lande, Chase is clearly correct in stating that there was no scientific literature on the matter when the campaign started. In other words, nothing was known by way of peer-reviewed science to gainsay the Forest Service report at the time the campaign commenced, and all the subsequent research was undertaken within the context of a political campaign, in the presence of a distinct ‘value slope’ (to use Iain Boale’s term) that made certain results more desirable than others. And that is the point.
Part 2:
In attempting to dismiss the lynx fur case as just a ‘right-wing led attack on scientists’ engineered by the Moonies, Andy Stahl demonstrates precisely the kind of defensive avoidance I discuss in my book. He ignores the complaints from scientist Scott Mills in Nature that the behaviour of those ‘scientists who were doing nothing more than ensuring the integrity of a genetics testing laboratory through the use of blind samples’ (as Andy Stahl disingenuously puts it) impugned the quite rigorous study that he had published with his colleagues. Note the title of this correspondence in Nature: ‘False samples are not the same as blind controls.’ But perhaps Andy Stahl knows that Mills votes Republican, so we can ignore him. But why was the ‘testing’ not known, according to Strassel in the WSJ, until a retiring colleague did a little whistleblowing?
Interestingly, I leave open in the book which side of the argument might be correct, but I point to Andy Stahl’s organization as an example of the politicization of the public service. Good environmental policy requires the best possible science, not the intervention of activist groups that allow those who might oppose such policy a cheap shot, and those who favour it a free pass.
If the scientific basis for policy on matters such as the spotted owl was better, perhaps the victories in the courts and politics to which Andy Stahl refers might have resulted in better outcomes than those he describes.
Regardless, Andy Stahl’s demand that I should have tracked him down for a personal interview demonstrates a strange conception of how one should regard published sources!
Professor Aynsley means to refer to "Iain Boal" (not "Iain Boale" which confused me a bit as Aynsley misspells Boal's name several times on the web). Boal is associated with the Retort Collective, "an association of radical writers, teachers, artists, and activists" in the San Francisco Bay Area. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iain_Boal.
Professor Aynsley appears to be unique -- he's the only person I can find who has ever referred to Boal's "value-slope."
For an explication of "value-slope," I can do no better than to quote Boal himself:
"Apart from the historiography and its framing, there are some important epistemological stakes in the matter of digital utopianism that neither Barbrook nor Turner come close to grappling with, since they tacitly agree, in the manner of Marxists and liberals, about the neutrality of technics. Neutrality in the sense that technologies are presumed to have good or bad uses, correct or incorrect ‘interpretations’, free or fettered ownership – in other words, a functionalist metaphysics. But artefacts (sic) and technical systems, without being self-determining, do have a value-slope; they conduce to certain forms of life and consciousness, and against others. On the other hand, the value-slope of a technology is far from easy to estimate, and in any case there is never closure with respect to consequences or reception. This is not to say that Armand Mattelard, the historian of semaphore and electric telegraphy, was wrong to assert: ‘Communication serves first of all to make war.’[3] Or, analogously, that Barbrook is beside the point in claiming that the internet was an integral legacy of the Cold War fostered by the CIA in response to the perceived threat of Soviet scientists and engineers’ invention of horizontal networks. Nevertheless it should be salutary for prophets of the net to recall that Adorno and Benjamin could so fundamentally disagree about the popular revolutionary potential of cinema as a medium. What then of the internet as an instrument of general emancipation, if, as it now seems, the technics of the virtual conduce to the production of monstrous subjects who are incomplete, lacking, overwhelmed inside. The corollary is a politics of resentment, and a paranoia that flourishes on the cusp of a plenitude always under threat of social death and incorporation into the machine."
Whatever.
Re 15
Stahl points out a discussion by Boal of the concept of a value slope. He comments "Whatever" which is apparently a reference to the difficulty in understanding the description.
It seems quite clear to me. My summary would be
===========
Value slope - technologies generate the political attitudes that surround them. It is difficult for people within these technologically determined cultures to perceive the effect of the technology upon their values. Even major philosophers can disagree on that, As an example people see the Internet as a form of personal emancipation but in reality it leads to isolation and paranoia.
==============
This seems like a common enough idea nowadays.
Andy Stahl has clearly exhausted his arguments when he takes to criticising me for typos, so let's end our discussion until and if he actually reads my book. I'd be happy to take up Sharon F's suggestion of a discussion in four weeks with those who have.
I was going to suggest that Andy Stahl might also benefit from reading some history and philosophy of science. Anything on Lysenkoism or Robert Proctor's excellent The Nazi War on Cancer (where I first came across the notion of a value slope). Or Roger's Honest Broker on the role scientists should be playing.
I agree with Professor Aynsley that "If the scientific basis for policy on matters such as the spotted owl was better, perhaps the victories in the courts and politics to which Andy Stahl refers might have resulted in better outcomes than those he describes."
The Forest Service originally said that protecting 5% of the owl's extant habitat (and, thus, by its calculus, 500 owl pairs) was sufficient because a bristle hair mutation does not become fixed in a randomly-mating population of 500 fruit flies.
And there the "science" supporting spotted owl conservation would have rested. The owl's habitat was then being logged at a rate of 6 billion board feet annually. There's little doubt that this outcome -- based on the U.S. federal government's best scientific determination -- would have been unfortunate for the owl.
Lande's analysis led the federal government (after some nudging in court) to increase its habitat protection from 5% to 83%. Logging levels dropped accordingly from 6 billion board feet to 0.5 billion board feet annually.
What the owl's continued population decline thereafter suggests is that too much habitat may have already been logged before we could arrest its lost. That possibility has troubled me from the outset.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is now revising the spotted owl's recovery plan.
re 18
I wonder if Andy Stahl realizes that he only confirms the validity of Kellow's book with his comments while at the same time missing the point
dljvjbsl: I wonder if you realize that the scientific basis for the government's spotted owl plan was as intellectually vacuous as an Ouija board.
Think about Boal's idea of a "value slope" A technology drives the political attitudes that surround it and the political attitudes that surround it further drive the technology. So it is a slope in the sense that it has a direction. The political views and the technology reinforce one another in a regenerative pattern. They cumulatively drive the values of the population in a direction..
Now think of what the advocates of carbon taxes, can and trade or similar policies are advocating. None of these policies individually may be effective but they are not intended to be so. Rather they are intended to set up the regenerative process that will transform the values of the current society from that of individual consumption to a green ethos.
Now consider the science surrounding the spotted own. Kellow demonstrates that it is of the same sort. It is not science to be published in scholarly journals but it is post normal science that is used to advocate a position. The activists driving the issue were using the courts to establish the political facts that would kick start the regenerative process. They would create values that would drive similar science that would reinforce the values and thus establish a new set of norms across society
I do not understand why Stahl is objecting to Kellow's analysis. It seems to me to be a straightforward analysis of the techniques that were used in the particular case of the spotted own and elsewhere. The spotted owl was not just a biological study but also a political act. There is nothing wrong or immoral about the way it was used. It is the way political values are established.
Now as Kellow points out the resulting political decions may be bad for the spotted owl in particular since there is no real knowledge generated for its decline. But the spotted owl was not the real subject of the effort anyway. It was to establish a broader set of values that would effect the dealing with natural species in general.
dljvjbsl,
I think you have captured it nicely! The spotted owl was about conservation biology and 'saving' an endangered species (or, perhaps, subspecies), for some, about stopping anthropocentric industrial forestry for others (like Earth First!), about preserving recreational forests for others, and so on. (Did the support of the Surdna Foundation help increase the value of the private forests of the Andrus family farther south?) This 'whirling' together of different reasons made for a powerful coalition.
Endangered species legislation has tended to make endangered species a trump card to be played in any environment-development conflict, and (unfortunately) it can have the effect of noble cause corruption on the science. Not 'unfortunate' because of the outcome (and I usually support at least decent levels of environmental protection), but because — as you note — it leaves us with poor science upon which to base our management decisions.
The problem is especially great with ecological science, which since Haeckel, has been infused with value terms like 'alien', 'invasive species' (as Chew and Laublichler pointed out).
The Weyerhaeuser Corporation endorsed the Clinton Administration's Northwest Forest Plan and its substantially increased protections for the spotted owl. Weyco doesn't buy federal timber, doesn't want the federal government competing with it in the timber seller's market, and doesn't want spotted owl protection measures imposed on its own timberlands, reasoning that the better protected the owl is on public land, the fewer protections are necessary on private land.
Weyco has more clout than the Surdna Foundation or Andrus family.
Andy Stahl #23:
How do your comments in #23 contradict what Aynsley Kellow wrote in #22?
In both cases, it's apparently an organization supporting a policy that happens to benefit the organization. And they're on the same policy side (pro-increased-protection on public lands...at least theoretically).
My comment #23 didn't purport to contradict Professor Kellow's comment #22. It did point out that the Surdna Foundation (with assets of less than $1 billion) is not in the same league as other political players with a stake in the matter.
Obviously, Weyco was not a part of any environmental coalition. It was, however, a part of our political calculus. Evidence of that can be found in Judge Dwyer's finding (based on evidence we submitted) that log export reductions could offset the timber supply effects of his injunction. Weyco then accounted for about 90% of U.S. softwood sawtimber exports. Our message was not lost on Weyco.
Dwyer was also prescient. U.S. softwood log exports plummeted after his injunction and have never rebounded to anywhere close to prior levels, for a variety of reasons I'll leave to the interested student to discover.
The philosopher Bruno Latour has pointed out that a project to succeed must make itself essential to the objectives of multiple stakeholders. Latouur explained this in terms of discreet projects that were competing with other projects for govern,enmt or commercial funding. Now the spotted owl issue indicates that the project need not be an end in itself. eh only essential thing is that it be something that can create a confluence of interests. So the spotted owl issue was something that allowed the coordinated behavior of a group so stakeholders each to their own self-interest.
The spotted owl was a virtual issue that was created opportunistically by the independent cooperation of multiple stakeholders each reinforcing an idea that could be used to foster their own vision and values - environmental, moral, pecuniary or whatever else.
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