SEATTLE -- The Bush administration -- having made it hard for federal scientists to talk publicly about global warming -- appears to have decided that loose lips are also bad when they talk about salmon.
The Washington office of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration -- the agency responsible for protecting endangered salmon -- has instructed its representatives and scientists in the West to route media questions about salmon back to headquarters. Only three people in the entire agency, all of them political appointees, are now authorized to speak of salmon, according to a NOAA employee who has been silenced on the fish.
The order was issued the day after an article appeared last month in The Washington Post quoting federal technocrats making positive statements about two recent decisions -- one by a federal judge, the other by federal scientists -- that challenged previous Bush administration policy about protecting salmon in the troubled Klamath River, which flows out of Oregon into California.
The judge, in a direct repudiation of administration policy, ruled that federal water managers, to protect fish during drought years, must limit the amount of water removed from the Klamath for irrigation farmers. The scientific decision, written by experts from NOAA and the Interior Department, said that hydroelectric dams on the Klamath should either be removed or be rebuilt in a way that allows salmon passage. This decision surprised environmentalists, because the Bush administration has often said that dams on some Western rivers are part of the "environmental baseline" -- and must never be removed.
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/30/AR2006053001057.html
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