Matters of Political Inconvenience: Scientists in the Public Service
Simona Perry | Interview with Jeff Ruch, PEER
An interview with Jeff Ruch, Executive Director of PEER, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility.
As I sat down last week to speak with Jeff Ruch, Executive Director of PEER since 1997, the news had not yet hit the presses that the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency's Region 5, Mary Gade, had resigned over disagreements with other Bush political appointees in her efforts to enforce clean-up of a dioxin contaminated Dow Chemical Company site in Midland, Michigan. The full story behind Gade's resignation has not yet been uncovered, but from documents obtained by The Chicago Tribune all indications are that in the course of doing her job - upholding environmental clean-up laws and protecting human health - she had become a problem for Dow and therefore a problem for politicians in Washington, DC. In the past seven years, reports and news stories reveal political manipulation of scientific evidence in cases when the science suggests more stringent environmental laws and regulations may be necessary to protect human health or natural resources. Here's a sampling of titles and headlines from just the past month: "EPA Opens Chemical Risk Assessment to Corporate Lobbying," "Systematic Interference with Science at Interior Department Exposed," "US Plan to Protect Right Whale From Shipping Blocked by Cheney," "Ozone Rules Weakened at Bush's Behest."
For 15 years, the non-profit PEER has been working on behalf of employees from federal, state and local governments in cases of whistleblower retaliation, scientific fraud and political malfeasance. Jeff Ruch explained to me that the politically charged workplace that government scientists are currently in is not new with the George W. Bush administration. However, Jeff pointed out during our conversation, what PEER has seen in the past seven years under Bush is an increase in the career level of federal employees who are calling for help. In the past, the typical request for assistance would come from a National Park biologist; today they field calls from National Park superintendents.
During the course of our interview, Jeff chronicled the founding of PEER, from its critical (and highly personal) mission of "talking down jumpers," to the pivotal cases of scientific fraud and government retaliation against employees who were just trying to do the job they were hired to do. He also talked about the progress he's seen, particularly in raising attention within the political culture of agencies and in more positive public attitudes towards whistleblowers. If you are concerned about the "political inconvenience" of public health and environmental issues facing the United States today and in the future, this interview should interest you. It offers a glimpse into the political battles being waged on a daily basis by the men and women who serve the United States in laboratories and cubicles across the country armed only with science, professional integrity, and a sense of duty to serve their fellow citizens.
Wednesday 30 April 2008, Washington, DC
Simona Perry: Prior to PEER, you worked with the Government Accountability Project, or GAP. Touted as giving "voice to truth-tellers," GAP is the nation's leading whistleblower organization, "working to promote government and corporate accountability by advancing occupational free speech, defending whistleblowers, and empowering citizen activists." So, how did your experiences at GAP pave the way for the work that PEER does today?
Jeff Ruch: When I worked with GAP I felt like I was in a legal M.A.S.H. unit because you get these disconnected calls from all over - public, private sector, you name it. And I felt like I was practicing emergency room law. One of the groups we started working with was a Forest Service employee organization, which still exists as the Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics, and I was struck that working through the organization you had the opportunity to practice preventive law and address underlying problems without having people be in the career emergency room. They ended up being one of the groups that I took over as a lawyer at GAP and that all led to a discussion of how to take employee activism beyond the Forest Service, and there was a conference held and the decision was made to start an umbrella organization, which became PEER. With PEER the idea was to be a service organization so that employees could work on environmental issues when they felt they couldn't do that same work in their day jobs. Sometimes it's dealing with obstructions, sometimes it's a limited mission or organizational myopia that's not addressing problems. So that's how we sort of grew up.
The model that we've had for the last decade or so is as a service organization in the sense that our work is entirely driven by intakes. In a way it's sort of anti-strategic but we think that's our strategic niche. Nobody else represents the employees, and so they determine what it is that we do and how we do it.
For that reason, a lot of times people come to us from environmental organizations. In some cases, employees get burned for working with environmental groups. In addition, a lot of groups - Sierra Club, Environmental Defense - working with agency insiders often reach a point in a relationship with an inside source where there's a "smoking gun" document, and the insider says, "well, if I give this to you what happens to me?" That's not the Sierra Club's mission and so they bring them to us.
For example, we're working with a network of current and former scientists in the Minerals Management Service on the Arctic outer continental shelf. They were brought to us by the environmental groups because they correctly perceived that it was not a good idea for groups that were in litigation against the government to be in direct contact with the scientists. They needed a middle man and somebody to represent the scientists. That's our job and we're brought in to play that role.
Helping these scientists and other specialists constructively ventilate their frustrations hopefully reduces alcoholism and spousal abuse. Otherwise, they end up in a spin cycle - they're so frustrated about issues that not only they care about, but in some instances that they dedicated their whole career to. When they see their work undone, or perverted, it really eats at them.
From our point of view, if you sort of step back and look at it there are about a quarter of a million environmental specialists who work at all levels of government, but the vast majority of them feel that they are not able to fully render public service. So if we can be a vehicle by which they can more effectively participate in the environmental movement then we are occupying an important role. For the most part our expertise is re-deploying their expertise, I mean in the same way that we're not strategic, we're also without content, in that we don't typically take positions on issues. Nobody cares what we think; we're an obscure acronym. They only care about it because these are the public's own experts that are coming forward and they're using our stationery to put that information in the public domain.
SP: What do you think makes PEER different from other whistleblower or government watchdog organizations like GAP?
JR: First of all I think one of the very best things we do - and we often do it on a daily basis - is that we talk people out of blowing the whistle. A lot of times we're contacted by people because they are upset and want to tell the world about a permit that's been improperly granted or an enforcement action that's been obstructed. If they went public with it they would certainly blow the whistle, but in many cases their career would be effectively over. Also, it's not entirely clear that by them going public that they would fix the thing that they were upset about, let alone the underlying dynamic that was causing the permit or the enforcement action.
So a lot of times we're, I call it, "talking down jumpers." We're talking them off the ledge, to consider other ways to deliver the message without the messenger. And, while we do whistleblower work - sometimes it's absolutely necessary because the person has already been hit by the car - to us it's the least efficient way to address the problems because the whistleblower case is basically about labor law and it turns on whether or not you were wrongfully fired or transferred or what not. So, if you win, you win restoration to an even more hostile bureaucracy, but the underlying dysfunction that caused you to take the career risk to begin with is beyond the jurisdiction of the court hearing the whistle blowing matter. So, if you're trying to address the underlying problem that's generally not the way to do it.
In the book "The Art of Anonymous Activism" that we published in cooperation with GAP and the Project on Government Oversight, we got GAP to agree to it, which was surprising. GAP views whistle blowing as noble. And while it often is noble, it's not universally noble. In essence, it is a guide on how not to be a whistleblower. With little chapters like "Reporters Are Not Your Friends." Not that they are enemies, but that they just have a different interest.
The second point is that the overwhelming majority of people that contact us are not whistleblowers in the normal sense in that they're usually in trouble because they're doing their job. And so, the distinction between a whistleblower and somebody doing work that's become institutionally inconvenient is increasingly blurred. A lot of times they're doing the same job they've been doing for 20 years. So, a classic example I use is a Forest Service biologist who did work on the goshawk, which is an indicator species like the spotted owl. His work was considered and submitted to peer reviewed journals, he was featured at conferences and things like that, but when his public work was used by an environmental group to sue the Forest Service to argue that for reasons of protecting the goshawk you needed to cut less timber, he suddenly - through no action of his own - went from golden boy to public enemy number one. The agency had to impeach the science and also by extension the scientist. His career just turned into a nightmare, and he hadn't done anything.
In some variation, that's a lot of what's going on. We see political intervention in science only when it is politically important to do so, so that if the science was irrelevant, and it was not bothering political contributors, then the White House wouldn't intervene. They only intervene when somebody calls them up and says, "this bothers me and I'm one of your supporters," and they'll say, "we'll get right on it," and they get right on it.
SP: PEER characterizes its constituency as "one of the most crucial and viable untapped resources in the conservation movement." Could you explain why you think that's the case? What makes these employees so crucial and why do they remain un-tapped?
JR: They are the public's experts and they are the eyewitnesses. So, in many instances they are the ones who are most knowledgeable about the issues and the implications of actions. They are underutilized because they are subjected to political screens. They are not allowed to openly discuss findings. One of the big issues right now is whether or not scientists are able to speak. And for the most part the prevailing law is no, they can't. They cannot discuss facts without approval.
Public agencies, not just the Bush administration, but Democratic and Republican administrations - we see it an awful lot at the state agency level - they insist that the government speak with one voice. Well, if the question is one of science, there isn't necessarily one voice. The whole point of science is there should be debate. And so, people are literally scared to death and don't know what to do.
One of the things I find most interesting about the surveys that we've done in science-based agencies isn't the amount of intervention (though that's the part we feature in the press releases); the part that I find most interesting is the high level of uncertainty as to what they think they're allowed to say, either inside the government or outside the government. We have tons of stories of scientists that get in trouble in ways that they never would have imagined for the smallest bits of candor.
And when you're marked, it's you against the agency and that's a bad place to be in. When people are in that situation for the right reasons, it's our job to basically empty our treasury and be there for them. But we would far prefer to work with them so that they are never in that situation, because that's not a pleasant thing to happen.
The vast majority of people that reach out to us, and for the most part they skew to be older, mid- or late-career people as opposed to early-career, more often than not say, "I never imagined I would call you." Because they never thought that that kind of thing would happen to them. And in many cases the reason that it happens to them is because they're not paying attention to the politics. And, I'm not suggesting that they should. They are the goshawk specialist or whatever the specialist is, and they didn't go into this work because they were interested in office politics - if they had, they would be the regional administrator or somebody else. And so, it's for that reason that they often don't realize when the winds shift behind them.
In many cases, because they are the experts, they believe they're right (and they usually are right) and so they want to elevate it up the chain of command. In doing that they often in fact descend into their own career inferno. Then they wake up one day and they realize that their chain of command is the problem, that the decision has been made, that the work they're doing is institutionally inconvenient. And that's usually the point when they reach out to us and say, "I'm crossing over to the other side."
What we're about is activism - we want good people to stay in the agency. That's why we sell PEER underwear, so that you can wear them to work and still have a career. It's not like we're looking for perpetual activism. The model we've arrived at is that you work with people and the immediate problem, and in a lot of cases it gets resolved. We hope they remain members of PEER and continue to donate, but we would suggest that they go out and have a beer and a career.
There are groups that specialize in birds and fish and other things, but our target ecosystem is the agency culture. So we want to make sure that there are good people that remain in. They are an important resource the way that wetlands are. Part of what we're trying to do is make sure that agencies have healthy ecosystems where information can flow in and out and sunlight can penetrate and diversity of opinion is tolerated.
So we view what we're doing as sort of a process in the sense that there are little victories, but very few of them are permanent victories. It's a continual process because we're trying to change the dynamics inside the agencies.
SP: A Forest Service botanist, in one of the testimonials on your website, writes that she fantasizes about a world in which PEER will no longer be needed.
JR: Well, and one person that told us that was Jim Baca, who was the Director of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) under President Clinton.
We had done one of our first white papers on grazing reform. The concern at the time was that Secretary Babbitt was going to sign off on a phony grazing reform and so we had this group of people inside BLM that were so paranoid because they were not only concerned about occupational retaliation, they were also concerned because they lived in small ranching towns and feared going to church, going to the store, and for their families. The white paper draft was passed from hand to hand and nobody knew who anyone was in the whole network. So we produced this paper on what grazing reform had to be. Baca was new and so we gave him an advance copy and then we released it. He then made this statement:
"I agree with what's in this paper, and the only thing I disagree with is the need for the authors to remain anonymous."
We were kind of impressed with that. So when we had a case that involved a BLM hydrologist on the San Pedro River, a very controversial area, who had been retaliated against for raising concerns about the water levels and was being transferred to a desert district, we brought that to Jim Baca's attention. A week later Baca happened to be in Arizona and during his tour he looked up this hydrologist, and asked him "You have a truck, let's go some place." And he got into the hydrologist's truck and the Director of the BLM drove away in the middle of the tour. Just completely flabbergasted the other people. And when he came back he reversed the transfer. He did that in two other cases that we brought him and so we met with him and said, "We're converted, what can we do?"
He asked us to put together kind of a kitchen cabinet of internal reformers, and we did. In our last meeting with him as Director of BLM, he told us he was making us superfluous, there was no need for PEER while he was the Director of the BLM. And then ten days later he was fired by Bruce Babbitt. That was in '94 I think it was, and from '94 through '96, at the time I was the general counsel here, we primarily were doing whistleblower cases on behalf of the kitchen cabinet who were all being subject to retaliation.
For the balance of the Clinton administration the BLM had no permanent administrator. It's sort of a cautionary tale.
One thing that has been different during these Bush years is that both the number, but also more dramatically, the GS grade, the seniority of the people that are intakes, has dramatically gone up. So, during the Clinton years our typical intake would have been a park biologist, now our typical intake is a park superintendent.
SP: Some members of Congress have been attempting to strengthen whistleblower protections with revised legislation since the current system of arbitration set up for federal whistleblowers under the 1989 Whistleblower Protection Act appears severely broken, with accusations of conflict of interest, political cronyism, and even homophobia within the Office of Special Counsel that is supposed to be the body that decides on whistleblower cases. What does all this mean to passage of a revised Whistleblower Protection Act in the current or next Congress?
JR: There is legislation that is pending and about to go to conference. But the two versions, House and Senate, have substantial differences that have to be resolved and the administration opposes both bills. So I don't know what the ultimate outcome will be.
From our point of view, some of the more significant provisions in the new version include things like for the first time extending the mantle of whistleblower protections to scientists. For the most part scientists fall outside of the gamut of the Whistleblower Protect Act because they're not disclosing, except in very extreme cases, violations of law or gross mismanagement or imminent threats to public health and safety. If a methodology is skewed or a key recommendation is removed, the current whistleblower law treats that as just a difference of opinion.
For the most part, the Office of Special Counsel is really in trouble. For example, the Special Counsel (Scott Bloch) having his computer erased and trying to do an investigation of the White House is just bizarre. I'm not quite sure what to make of it. So Bloch's term is up in January. His five year term. He can only be removed by the President for cause. This insularity was built in, because it was a sensitive position - and in this case where you have a nutball in as Special Counsel, the insulation means it looks like Bloch is going to stay until the end of this term no matter how nutty he is. And then I don't know what happens.
But even the White House, according to Bloch, has asked him to resign at least twice. He claims that's because it's part of a gay rights conspiracy.
SP: Last week, the Union of Concerned Scientists came out with a report that said, based on an on-line questionnaire sent to 5,419 EPA scientists in the summer of 2007, that 889 of the 1,586 who replied reported experiencing at least one type of interference within the last five years. This received a lot of media attention as factual, as opposed to anecdotal, evidence that political interference or manipulation at the EPA is undermining decision-making in the public interest. However, the response rate was only 29 percent. Why do you think more employees did not respond?
JR: There are a variety of reasons - you can't prove them. But, there's fear, and in some cases there's indifference, there's a sense that nothing can change, and in some other instances, there's distrust.
When we first started doing surveys I was struck at how many came back with critiques of the questions. And there's sort of a bureaucratic quality to it, and also to get scientists to agree to an absolute statement is one of the toughest things you can do.
We've been doing surveys for a long time. I think there are about thirty on our site. It's a means of collective disclosure that's completely safe. For example, when George Allen was governor of Virginia, we did one of our early surveys in Virginia DEQ (Department of Environmental Quality). More than half of the people surveyed who identified as managers, and I think all together there were thirty of them, indicated that they had experiences where they had been directed to overlook environmental laws. If any one of them had stood up and said, "On February 12th I got this orderÉ" he or she would have been ripped apart by a pack of dogs. The fact that there was this sort of collective expression that came out was enough to trigger attention; there was a front page Washington Post story, and it resulted in a legislative auditor investigation. And so when Allen was leaving, both the Republican and Democrat campaigned on DEQ reform.
The rates of return for mail-in surveys, I think the industry standard is about 10 percent, and so 29 percent is O.K. The thing about it is, it's not like you're trying to take a sample and then project forward. We view them as sort of "mass speech." So that even if it's only a minority of the agency, the fact that 30 percent of responding scientists, meaning 700 scientists, say technical information was removed from a document for non-technical reasons, even if that is a minority, that's 700 scientists saying that something happened - that's important in and of itself, even if it's not predictive.
I think it's difficult at EPA because of the way that the agency is organized. By contrast when we were dealing with field offices and ecological services within US Fish and Wildlife, there's sort of a series of jobs where it's almost like a regulatory car wash. There's a unified theme. There was a higher rate of return and the result was clearer. EPA's a much harder agency in the sense that the pure scientists, for the most part, are detached from regulatory decisions. They're working in ORD (Office of Research and Development), and you got air and water and other divisions. You've got scientists that are in there, but they're generally working with attorneys and engineers and others and so they're not all doing the same thing. I'm not sure we would have done that EPA survey exactly the same way. We would have maybe broken the agency down in order to get more of a pure view. From our point of view it's more productive surveying people who are in a comparable situation.
We've often used surveys as a referendum on something like a proposed re-organization or a leadership change. Those kinds of things tend to up the rate of return and they're sort of galvanizing. They're a tool. And we've done, for that same reason, a number of surveys of Wildlife Refuge managers and those tend to have very high rates of return. One had as high as 90% - but then they were all mad. There was an attempt to get rid of the programmatic identity. So our survey was a referendum on that.
SP: That idea of the surveys being a kind of "mass speech" seems particularly important.
JR: Yes, in the case of the US Fish and Wildlife Service survey we did with Union of Concerned Scientists in 2005 we were receiving so many individual complaints about Julie MacDonald and her boss Craig Manson that we were wondering how to universalize this, so the survey was a way.
Sort of in defense of MacDonald and Manson, they were doing what they thought they should have been doing. And if you talk to them now they would stoutly defend what they were doing. When I first saw Craig Manson, the Assistant Secretary, it was at a get to know you breakfast at Interior. And we had received all of these complaints where documents like proposed critical habitat had gone from x to half of x and things had been changed from "are" too "not". These were real direct interventions.
So I was going to ask him, "Do you do these things?" And when I got there his speech said, "What I do is I intervene, and I inject policy and I change these documents." He was saying, "I perceive this is my job. The scientist comes to me and then I inject policy." So I asked him, "You inject policy, does that include opposition from local politicians?" "Yes, I would consider that perfectly legitimate." And so then my follow-up question was, "Is there anything you consider illegitimate?" And he stopped for a second and said, "Something that's illegal." So unless you greased his palm everything was sort of fair game. But, that's what they view their job as being.
Bruce Babbitt did the same thing. We did a report called "War of Attrition" that was based upon actual court records that highlighted nine high profile cases where the information had come out through litigation (it wasn't based on whistleblowers, but it was suggested by a whistleblower) that Babbitt had intervened, and one was at the behest of then-Governor George Bush on behalf of some salamander outside Austin. But that's what Babbitt did in these high profile cases, which is not anything more defensible than what Craig Manson was doing, it was just that you multiply that by ten or twenty and now it has become routine.
So, the difference is that in the Bush administration, everything has to be screened, everything requires approval, and that to some extent is a function of the way the Bush administration works. Everything is tightly controlled. In agencies like the Park Service, the director of the Park Service isn't making any of the substantive decisions, from Yellowstone to who will be the next superintendent at Grand Canyon, they're all being made above.
SP: During the late eighties and early 1990s there were accusations levied against EPA of misusing studies into "environmental tobacco smoke," or second-hand smoke, to further a political anti-smoking agenda. It seems there is nothing new to the political manipulation of science, or "scientific fraud," and the important balancing act that federal environmental scientists have to negotiate between science, politics, and professional integrity. Will this ever change?
JR: I see progress. I see distinct progress in a number of ways. For example, the excesses of the Bush administration have framed political manipulation of science as an issue in a way that it was never framed before, and I think that, whether it's a new whistleblower bill this year or not, certainly in the next administration there will be substantial legal reform to address the issue. To me that's significant.
I also think there's been a huge and continuing social evolution in terms of the perception of whistleblowers. Twenty years ago I think there was more of an expectation of how could you be a whistleblower or whether or not you were violating some omerta, a pledge of silence, or somehow being disloyal. Now I think there's a growing expectation that there ought to be whistleblowers and when there are scandals, I was struck that sometimes you see reporting asking, "Why weren't there whistleblowers?" You now expect to see them. They've become a much more accepted part of what's going on and I think there's a greater anticipation in the sense that this is sort of normal.
So, in 2004, in the Time magazine "People of the Year" were three prominent whistleblowers. I'm not sure that that by itself did anything, but it sort of signaled that when you look back over time there's really been a sea change in the sense that these people are now socially regarded as heroes more often than pariahs.
Sometimes there is regression. We represented an Army Corps economist named Don Sweeney who was the lead economist for the Upper Mississippi Locks and Dam Reconstruction - it's a public works project that's second only to the Everglades Restoration in terms of the size, and its a matter of replacing and expanding I think its twenty locks and dams from St. Louis north, up the Mississippi River. He exposed a plan by the Corps to "cook the books" to justify the project. His disclosure triggered an official investigation that not only vindicated him but found an inherent conflict of interest throughout Corps planning. The outcome was an official report recommending that two generals and a colonel be disciplined and their careers ended. But, as a result of this case, the Army Corps basically stopped using email and bent over backwards to eliminate paper trails. Now, when they have important decision meetings they have them by video conference and nobody is allowed to leave with notes. So one aspect of all this is to teach them to cheat better.
But, it also shows an awareness of scrutiny that heretofore didn't exist. And so, I suppose you could argue that it's progress that they're being more cautious and circumspect rather than acting with impunity.
SP: But what about scientific fraud remaining a problem within the agencies?
JR: Transparency is the real key. Because if there's transparency that means there's outside review and to the extent that there's controversy then you can pull in professional societies, or the National Academies of Science, or others. Not that they're always right, but that tends to move it completely from the bounds of a political decision-maker of saying, "day is night." Or, my favorite Julie MacDonald example was an email about the Gunnison prairie dog. She said "change pd (prairie dog) rec (recommendation) from pos to neg." So, in this 200-page report recommending the listing of the Gunnison prairie dog, just change the conclusion but you can leave the rest of it alone.
On the point of scientists as advocates, I urge them to be advocates for science. Professional societies should act as peer reviewers and monitors of what's going on. Also one of the things that we've expressed concern about it is the inability of government scientists to fully participate in those societies. To the extent that the societies were more involved in, not so much in the formulation, but the reporting and review of agency science, the more outside people there are, particularly if their affiliations are disclosed, the better it is and the harder it is to manipulate because there are too many people watching.
This sort of stuff can only take place if it's done shielded from any kind of public knowledge. When the report came out about Julie MacDonald, she resigned rather than face a Congressional hearing and fled the jurisdiction. I got the pleasure of sitting next to and testifying with Lynn Scarlet who is the Deputy Secretary. Got to basically beat her about the head and shoulders and then watched while Committee members beat her about the head and shoulders. One of the most painful things I'd ever seen.
The Fish and Wildlife Service has finally adopted a code of scientific conduct. And, on paper at least, it says some very important things, like you're supposed to place accuracy above loyalty, you're supposed to disclose any concerns you have about the quality of the information, you're supposed to openly share factual information inside and outside the agency. It doesn't have a heck of a lot of teeth in it, but the fact that they felt compelled to even hurry up and promulgate something like that (it's in their manual) is a step forward because it provides scientists in that agency a hook for, if nothing else, whistleblower protection. Because now they can allege violation of a rule or policy because it's codified in the Fish and Wildlife Service manual. It's all the outgrowth of the Julie MacDonald scandal and after that hearing, which was a year ago in May, that left Interior sort of defenseless.
The thing that we keep pointing to is that Secretary Dick Kempthorne, who has declared ethical reform as one of the hallmarks of his tenure, has been utterly absent from this whole debate. It could be that we're just too deeply engaged in it, but I view this all as progress.
SP: So what about the future?
JR: I think in a lot of these issues, even John McCain will try to be the anti- Bush, in the sense that I don't think you're going to see the same sort of manipulation. Also you'll see a sensitivity to accusations that they have engaged in it. I think that there'll also be Congressional reform either through the context of whistleblower protection or other venues.
One of the things going on right now - the EPA "in the name of transparency" secretly revising their chemical risk assessment process - I think you'll see involvement in fixing that, because one of the things that's significant about the way EPA revised the risk assessments was that all the inter-agency review, particularly with the Defense Department, is shielded from public view. A lot of the chemicals that were subject to those internal reviews were defense-related.
We also do a lot of Defense Department work, and we expect to be doing even more of that. Not only because we don't see a heck of a lot of other people doing it and we represent a lot of the -ologists that work inside these agencies, but also everyone has pledged to grow the military. So with the military footprint in the domestic US - just the Army alone needing training ground expansion and talking about needing new areas about the size of New Jersey - you're going to see more land, more sensitive land come under fire.
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Simona Perry is currently finishing her PhD research into the politics and sociology of environmental restoration and hazardous waste clean-ups. She previously served as a biologist and policy analyst with the federal government, conducting research and writing regulations and policy documents on endangered species. She is a reporter and an assistant editor at Truthout.
www.truthout.org/docs_2006/050708J.shtml