Bush Administration: Exploit at will

When it comes to the environment, there's a web of life. There's also a web of deceit, which appears whenever the Bush administration touches almost anything in the Northwest ecosystem.

The Earthjustice law firm last week released documents indicating that Julie MacDonald, a former Fish and Wildlife Service deputy assistant secretary, had meddled in scientific reports on marbled murrelets, a threatened Northwest seabird the administration has tried to remove from Endangered Species Act protections. Earthjustice is properly asking the service, which has already scrapped other work tainted by MacDonald's repeated political interference, to withdraw a biological review of the murrelet.

Meanwhile, the Bureau of Land Management keeps pushing ahead with outrageous plans to back away from involvement in a Northwest forest plan to protect the spotted owls. At the same time, the Fish and Wildlife Service is trying to finalize a draft on owl recovery that flunked peer review. The service blandly insists the effort will lead to the "best final recovery plan possible for the northern spotted owl, one that incorporates the latest science." That's almost impossible to believe, given the tainted origins of the current draft.

To the south, officials have released a 10-year plan for irrigation around Oregon and California's Klamath Basin, where Vice President Dick Cheney personally involved himself in decisions that led to a huge 2002 fish kill. The environmental group Oregon Wild says the document sets the stage for a decade of drought-level water flows.

When it comes to the environment, the administration's record is remarkably consistent. Whenever possible, the science is fixed around the policy of ruthless exploitation of natural resources.