Seoulscapade

You’d be a fool to expect that women, society’s traditional nurturers, can be more trustworthy to do the right thing by other creatures sharing the planet. You’d be a fool to think they have a sense of moral propriety inherently superior to men. Some of them are just evil bitches, and you’d be a fool not to accept the fact. The following profile is about one of those.

I refer to the former Deputy Assistant Secretary for Fish and Wildlife and Parks in the US, Julie MacDonald, who resigned April 30, 2007, in the midst of a scandle and in disgrace. So what happened, what kind of things did she get up to?

Broadly, “Ms. MacDonald has betrayed the mission she swore to uphold,” as Wyden put it, a member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. It was a betrayal guided by self-serving powermongering and evil.

“It looks like another Bush administration official was protecting her own bottom line instead of protecting the public interest,” said George Miller, a senior member and former chairman of the Natural Resources Committee and a long-time proponent of the Endangered Species Act and Bay-Delta fish and wildlife issues.

THE WITCH AND THE WILDLIFE

A Department of the Interior Inspector General’s investigation found that she bullied U.S. Fish and Wildlife scientists, violated federal ethics rules by leaking sensitive government documents to friends, industry lobbyists and political allies, and illegally overturning scientific recommendations to stop protections for endangered species.

MacDonald repeatedly leaked internal Fish and Wildlife Service documents to business groups who opposed the Service and its environmental decision making in court. Some of these internal documents later surfaced as evidence in lawsuits filed against the Service.

She sent draft studies and preliminary discussions about application of the Endangered Species Act to the California Farm Bureau Federation and the Pacific Legal Foundation; to two people with e-mail addresses at Chevron; and to the father of an online role-playing game partner, who had no legitimate reason for access to internal Interior Department records.

An engineer by training, MacDonald had no scientific background. But she routinely phoned biologists to try to weaken protection for wildlife and force scientists to alter their findings about endangered species.

She was heavily involved with editing, commenting on, and reshaping the Endangered Species Program’s scientific reports from the field. She interfered with field reports such as the sage grouse risk analysis, a critical habitat decision for endangered bull trout, a designation of California’s northern and southern tiger salamanders as distinct populations, a decision about California’s delta smelt, and an analysis of California’s vernal pools as critical habitat.

In a number of e-mails and comments on the bull trout critical habitat decision, an agent of the IG’s office wrote, “MacDonald forced a reduction in critical habitat miles in the Klamath River basin from 296 to 42 miles.”

A former Endangered Species Director said that, “MacDonald did not want to accept petitions to list species as endangered, and she did not want to designate critical habitats.”

“In one case, she demanded that the determined nesting range of the Southwest Willow Flycatcher be shrunk from a 2.1 mile radius to 1.8 miles, so that it would not cross into the state of California, where her husband’s family owned a ranch,” said Wyden.

Which brings us to the conflict of interest issue. She improperly removed a California fish from a list of threatened species in order to protect her own financial interests.

She was actively involved in removing the Sacramento splittail fish from the federal threatened and endangered species list at the same time that she was profiting from her ownership of a farm that lies within the habitat area of the threatened fish, according to an investigative report published Sunday by the “Contra Costa Times” newspaper.

MacDonald’s financial disclosure statement shows that she earns as much as $1 million per year from her ownership of the 80 acre active farm in Dixon, California.

This only scratches the surface of the travesties she committed.

ILLEGAL ACTIONS COME TO AN END

Final she was stopped. “Julie MacDonald’s reign of terror over the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is finally over,” said Kieran Suckling, policy director of the Center for Biological Diversity, a nonprofit conservation group based in Tucson, Arizona. “Endangered species and scientists everywhere are breathing a sigh of relief.”

To redress the evils McDonald committed, federal biologists are going to reconsider several decisions affecting endangered animals that were improperly influenced by her. They will review and probably overturn eight decisions on wildlife and land-use issues. Among the decisions that could be reversed is the determination last year to slash 90 percent of the proposed critical habitat for an imperiled frog in California. In the East Bay, 99 percent of the proposed critical habitat for California red-legged frogs was eliminated.

But some conservationists say the scope of the review of too narrow.

“Although we are glad these species will receive consideration for additional protection, the list of decisions to be reconsidered is outrageously incomplete and appears to be a token effort designed for damage control and cover up, rather than an attempt to address the problem,” said the Center for Biological Diversity, CBD.

“Fish and Wildlife’s reconsideration of eight decisions tainted by former assistant secretary Julie MacDonald is a day late and a dollar short,” said CBD conservation biologist Noah Greenwald.

“Despite no scientific training, MacDonald interfered in dozens of scientific decisions concerning endangered species – only a full and transparent accounting of all the decisions tainted by MacDonald’s malignant influence can undue the damage she has done,” Greenwald said.

Greenwald says the list fails to include decisions to not list the Mexican garter snake, to potentially delist the marbled murrelet, and to sharply reduce critical habitat for the bull trout, even though regional directors of the Fish and Wildlife Service specifically requested that these decisions be reconsidered because of MacDonald’s influence.

The list also fails to include reconsideration of critical habitat for a fish called the Sacramento splittail, even though a story by the “Contra Costa Times” newspaper revealed that MacDonald may have illegally limited designation of its habitat to avoid an 80 acre farm she owns in Dixon, California.

“We welcome Julie MacDonald’s resignation,” said UCS Scientific Integrity Program Director Francesca Grifo, “but she represents a much larger problem of widespread political interference at federal agencies.”

“The real culprit here is not a renegade political appointee.” Grifo said. “The real culprit is a process where decisions are made behind closed doors.”

REDNECK POLITICS OVER SCIENCE

MacDonald’s actions sparked an outcry among agency biologists and environmental advocates and led to a series of hearings in Congress on whether the Bush administration was politicizing science.

Rep. Nick Rahall, chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, praised the Interior Department for “stepping up to the plate to begin addressing the ‘politics trumps science’ ploy endemic throughout this [Bush] administration.” His committee held a hearing on MacDonald’s actions shortly after her resignation was announced. Mr. Rahall added, “What we have learned to date raises concerns about political tinkering with science that has affected many endangered-species-related decisions — and goodness knows what else — that deserve further scrutiny.”

The conflict between science and political ideology has been a recurrent theme in Washington in recent years, with complaints arising from inside and outside the administration about decisions on oil exploration, timber rights, global warming and public health. Just last week, the former surgeon general Richard H. Carmona said top Bush administration officials had repeatedly tried to water down or suppress important public health reports for political considerations.

“But MacDonald was the administration’s attack dog, not its general,” Suckling said. “The contempt for science and law that she came to symbolize goes much deeper than a single Department of Interior employee.”

“It’s a travesty that a high-level political appointee with no training in biology is rewriting the conclusions of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service scientists,” said Melissa Waage, legislative director for the Center for Biological Diversity. “The Bush administration has an unwritten policy to systematically deny protection to imperiled wildlife, dooming them to extinction.”

Thank goodness there are people out there that are combating such evil bitches. The problem is that people like that, who make life a little bit more like hell on Earth for living creatures, are everywhere in our midsts and in the corridors of power. What a shame they can only picked off one by one. What a shame they are not an endangered species.

Sources:

http://www.philly.com/philly/wires/ap/news/nation/washington/cabinet/8636542.html
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/jul2007/2007-07-20-04.asp
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/mar2007/2007-03-29-09.asp#anchor1
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/may2007/2007-05-01-03.asp http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/may2007/2007-05-21-06.asp
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/21/washington/21interior.html?ref=us
http://www.contracostatimes.com/news/ci_6432056

For more, see this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julie_MacDonald