on the cover / By Heidi Walters

The Biocrat

“I’ve heard of the allegations about Cheney,” he said. “But I don’t have the facts….”

He says one time a congressman tried to cut his Klamath Fishery Management Council budget because of something the council had written. Detrich and he talked about it, and Detrich said he “tried in subsequent proceedings of the KFMC to make sure that we stayed within the boundaries of our direction under the law.”

So he agreed with the congressman? “Mmm. Well, let’s just say I took his advice.” He said it didn’t affect the council’s mission directly. “And to some degree or another, those kinds of subtle pressures exist all the time. Politics is not a dirty thing; it’s just the process by which we work out competing interests. The question is how political pressures are dealt with, and whether it’s done in a way that’s aboveboard and ethical or not.” And, he noted, political pressure comes from both directions.

He said he’s often had to remind young biologists that their mission under the ESA is not, in fact, to “advocate for wildlife.”

“Congress delegated the enforcement of the ESA to the Secretary of Interior and to the Secretary of Commerce, and that’s delegated down to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service,” Detrich said. “So we work for the Executive Branch, and we have to administer the law as it is written. It’s the junction between law and science and politics. It’s really challenging and it’s really interesting, and there almost always is somebody who is unhappy.”

That said, Detrich worries over how the FWS’s staffing and budget are not near enough to keep pace with species protection needs, especially in fast-growing Central and Southern California. Even up here, species are in danger. The marbled murrelet, for whom all of the habitat that can be protected has been, is being pecked out of existence by nest-robbing ravens and crows who go wherever people go. And perhaps they’re being impacted at sea. Salmon, who need cold water, will continue to suffer if the climate keeps getting warmer.

“I go back to a precept that was proposed to me in college by a professor of environmental economics, and that was that population size times standard of living equals environmental impact,” he said.

People need to practice more diligent conservation, he said. And that doesn’t include just shifting the environmental costs of timber cutting from California to another state, for instance.

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