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Bush Administration appointee does not believe in basic Bio 101 level fact

This was one of the scariest things I’ve read today:

The man chosen to head the Bush administration’s wildfire prevention program doubts the existence of ecosystems and says it would not be a crisis if the nation’s threatened and endangered species became extinct.

…

In “The Illusion of Ecosystem Management,” published in 1999 by the Political Economy Research Center, which says it applies market principles to environmental problems, Fitzsimmons says ecosystems exist only in the human imagination and cannot be delineated. Federal policies, therefore, should not be used to try to manage or restore them, he wrote.

In another paper, entitled “Ecological Confusion among the Clergy,” Fitzsimmons criticizes religious leaders who encourage their parishioners to worship God by protecting the environment. He singled out Catholic bishops who issued their own paper in 1997 in support of protecting and restoring the Columbia River watershed. The paper was published in 2000 by the Center for Economic Personalism, which advocates limited government and promotes religion and “economic liberty.”

“By urging the public to make changes in their lives to accommodate nonexistent ecosystem needs, one wonders if the bishops are beginning inadvertently to make an idol out of their own creation, what they call the Columbia Basin ecosystem,” he writes.

He added that the biodiversity crisis religious leaders often point to is not a crisis at all. There are between 250,000 and 750,000 species in the United States and 1,201 are on the Fish and Wildlife Service’s endangered and threatened list.

“If each of these species were to become extinct tomorrow, our total biological endowment would decline by less than 1 percent, which would be a disconcerting loss but would not constitute a crisis,” Fitzsimmons writes. “Conversely, at least 4,500 non-indigenous species have established free-living populations in the United States over the past few hundred years, so that on balance, this part of the world has seen an increase in biological diversity.”

Timothy Ingalsbee, executive director of the Western Fire Ecology Center, said many of those non-indigenous species — like cheatgrass — are taking over native landscapes with devastating results. Cheatgrass is highly flammable, has little nutritional value for livestock and chokes out native plants.

“Making the argument that non-native species are increasing the biological diversity is pure bunk.”

Okay. It’s one thing to appoint somebody to a post like this that is pro-logging or pro-corporate. That wouldn’t be too surprising. After all, the writing is on the wall that this administration worships war and the corporation above all else. I disagree with that stance, but they are the administration, so they will obviously make appointments that fit their agenda. If these are Fitzsimmons’ actual views on basic ecological principles, however, this guy is a freaking whacko.

The concept of ecosystems is not some new environmentalist thing. It has been around since at least the early twentieth century (Arthur Tansky coined it in 1935) as an actual term, but the idea is even older (ecology became an actual discipline of biology around 1866). I just do not understand how someone could just declare that this stuff does not exist. Unbelievable.

(via marc)

September 25th, 2002 Posted by Rob | Science! | 2 comments