on the cover / By Heidi Walters

The Biocrat

Detrich calls some of these critics, the ones who walk out on otherwise overwhelmingly supported deals, fundamentalists who will risk losing more than they are trying to save.

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Detrich said he loved the balancing act of all of these deals. And he was endlessly intrigued by the interplay of value systems. And by “outliers.”

“I was thinking recently about redwood summer and Julia Butterfly and about civil disobedience by farmers in Klamath Falls,” Detrich said. “And I was thinking about the parties who decided not to sign onto the Klamath settlement. And there’s just been in the course of my career such amazing examples of these outliers — outliers of philosophy and behavior, versus the more central tendency — and I’ve just been wondering about the influence of these people on the process. I’ve never met Julia Butterfly, but we were working on the same issue in different ways for many years, and I had climbed into trees to eagle nests in the old days. I’ve been in a lot of big trees, and I’ve been up there when the wind was blowing, and her experience, the months and months she spent up there through the winters, it is just incredible for me to contemplate.

“But what did she really accomplish? Well, she called attention to the issue. Did her feelings have any impact on what I decided or tried to negotiate at the table? No. I tried to carry out my role within the confines of the science and the law and regulation. And I hope those have always been my bounds.”

He said he was moved by the tragedies, and the theater, of the time. But he was glad to be part of settlements intended to bring peace in the forest and peace on the river.

“I do think that without the environmental movement as a whole, our environment would be in real big trouble,” he said. “But I do think that some of the fundamentalists have maneuvered themselves into a position where they have no credibility. That’s true for any human endeavor. On the environmental side. On the property rights side. On the religious side.”

Meanwhile, people outside the FWS like to ponder what sort of non-scientific or non-legal influences do have an effect on the Service’s employees. There was the Julie MacDonald affair — a high-level appointee in the Interior Department reaching down to yank the ear of staff-level biologists to influence ESA decisions. Detrich said that was an extreme, an unusual, example, and one he found as unacceptable as anyone, although it didn’t happen in his office. But did he ever feel pressure from the White House, or from Congress? Cheney?

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