Corporate Forestry and Academic Freedom
by Richard York
Following the Biscuit Fire of 2002, which burned half a million acres
in the Siskiyou National Forest in southwest
administration geared up to circumvent national environmental
laws and implement the largest public timber sale in recent history,
all in the guise of "salvage logging" purportedly aimed at helping the
forest regenerate. The Siskiyou region is one of the few areas in the
lower 48 states that still contains extensive roadless wild forests and
healthy salmon runs, and it is the most biologically diverse ecosystem
on the West Coast. Environmentalists were naturally alarmed by this
grab for timber, since they were well aware that burned forests are
biologically rich and that dead trees provide habitat for a myriad of
species as well as enriching the soil as they decompose. Furthermore,
not widely known by the general public, in order to boost the value of
the sales, a large portion of the timber taken in "salvage" sales comes
from the cutting of live (often centuries-old) trees that survived the
flames. Long-time environmental activists knew from experience that
logging and the road-building that typically accompanies it damage
soils, increase erosion, and undermine the integrity of forest
ecosystems.
In Defense of the Biscuit
Disregarding the threats to the forest ecosystem, the
Service, backed by several prominent forestry professors from the
logging in the burned area and, after extensive legal wrangling,
managed to push through several timber sales despite widespread
public opposition. Advocates of the sales argued that logging was
necessary to help reduce the risk of future fires and speed forest
recovery.
In an attempt to cut through the often emotionally charged debate over
the effects of salvage logging on forest regeneration, Daniel Donato, a
graduate student in the Department of Forest Science at OSU, and his
five colleagues undertook a study examining sites burned in the Biscuit
Fire before and after salvage logging operations to scientifically assess
the effects of logging on the land. The results of this study,
informatively titled "Post-Wildfire Logging Hinders Regeneration
and Increases Fire Risk," were published by the prestigious journal
Science, initially on-line on January 5th of this year, followed in the
print edition on January 20th.1 Donato and his colleagues concluded
that their "data show that postfire logging, by removing naturally
seeded conifers and increasing surface fuel loads, can be counterproductive
to goals of forest regeneration and fuel reduction." These
results, obviously, undermine the arguments made to justify the salvage
logging and are particularly pertinent since Congress is considering
developing legislation that would mandate logging on public lands
after fires and bypass input from the public.
The scandal surrounding the shaky rationale used to support the
logging in the first place may be surpassed by the one emerging after
recent events. Press reports reveal that several forestry professors at
OSU as well as officials at the U.S. Forest Service tried to suppress the
study. In an unorthodox move, they appealed to the editor of Science,
Donald Kennedy, a former President of Stanford University, to not
publish the study unless it was modified to address their concerns.
Kennedy, noting that the effort to stop publication raised concerns
about censorship, rightly argued that debate on the issue should take
place in an open scientific forum and published the study. The paper
by Donato and his colleagues, like all papers submitted to Science, was
subjected to rigorous external review by experts on the subject before
being accepted for publication. Serious ethical concerns are raised by
the attempt of the OSU professors who did not like the findings of the
study to disrupt the typical publication process and undermine a
graduate student in their own college.
One important issue at the heart of this controversy is the potentially
malign effect of corporate interests on academic freedom and the
scientific process. The OSU College of Forestry and many of its
faculty members have long had close ties to the timber industry and a
portion of the funding for the College comes from a tax on logging.
It is, then, perhaps unsurprising that OSU foresters often take actions
that serve to further timber interests. The entire incident is reminiscent
of a recent controversy at the
an ecologist, Ignacio Chapela, was denied tenure for dubious
reasons in November 2003. Chapela was an outspoken critic of an
academic-industrial partnership between the University and the
Swiss agribiotech firm Syngenta and had published research in the
leading scientific journal Nature reporting that the genome of
Mexican maize had been contaminated by genes flowing from
genetically modified crops.2 Following his appeal, an investigation
found that a geneticist on a key committee reviewing Chapela's
tenure had serious conflicts of interest, including having connections
to biotech firms and being a central participant in the agreement with
Syngenta (Chapela was finally granted tenure in May 2005). This
controversy ultimately led to an external investigation that
concluded that the deal with Syngenta was a mistake and argued
that university partnerships with industry should be avoided.3
The incident at OSU and others like it raise serious concerns about the
influence of private capital on the scientific research and publication
process and on freedom of speech more generally. There are an
alarming number of cases where scientists who are supposed to be
impartial judges of scientific evidence have close ties to capital
interests which favor certain types of research findings. Although it is
heartening that there are more than a few scientists, like Donato and
Chapela, who are willing to go against powerful interests, attempts to
suppress research findings that conflict with corporate agendas ought to
spur the public to question how power is distributed in our world.
1 D. C. Donato, J. B. Fontaine, J. L. Campbell, W. D. Robinson, J. B.
Kauffman, and B. E. Law, 2005, "Post-Wildfire Logging Hinders
Regeneration and Increases Fire Risk," Science 311.5759: 352.
2 Rex Dalton, 2004, "Review of Tenure Refusal Uncovers Conflicts of
Interest," Nature 430.7000: 598.
3 Rex Dalton, 2004, "Biotech Funding Deal Judged to Be 'A Mistake' for
Richard York is an assistant professor of sociology at the
Siskiyou Project (http://www.siskiyou.org/), a non-profit
organization working to protect the Siskiyou ecosystem,
which opposed the Biscuit timber sales.