Oregon graduate student versus the logging industry

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

The Chronicle of Higher Education  Government & Politics

http://chronicle.com/weekly/v52/i33/33a02701.htm

From the issue dated April 21, 2006
How a Graduate Student Kindled a Firestorm in Forestry Research

Treatment of a scientific paper on logging after wildfires raises issues of 
academic freedom and industry influence

By JEFFREY BRAINARD

It's not often that a graduate student plays the leading role in writing a 
paper that lands in the journal Science, triggering an avalanche of 
critical questions from professors at his own university, not to mention a 
U.S. congressman.

And it's even less often that the work ofa 29-year-old pursuing a master's 
degree prompts his university to reflect publicly about weighty issues like 
academic freedom and the appropriate role of industry support for scholarly 
work.

But that's what happened to Oregon State University's Daniel C. Donato 
after he wrote a paper that raised questions about the wisdom of logging 
trees burned in forest fires. The article on so-called salvage logging was 
published in January after faculty members from Mr. Donato's own 
institution failed to get Science to delay its release.

Like a smoldering blaze, the controversy at Oregon State has only seemed to 
grow hotter and spread with time.

Just this month, a state senator released e-mail messages he had obtained 
from the dean of the university's College of Forestry that painted an 
unflattering picture of the dean's role in the controversy. The dean, Hal 
Salwasser, wrote colleagues about doing "damage control" on the paper and 
offered suggestions to timber-industry representatives about crafting a 
public rebuttal.

Mr. Salwasser also wrote of the study's effects on the college's 
fund-raising efforts and on a Congressional bill, which he publicly backed, 
that could increase salvage logging in Oregon. He now says he wishes he had 
done some things differently.

The fracas at Oregon State, while more extreme than most, illustrates the 
conflicts of interest that arise when public universities are expected to 
both produce high-quality, independent scholarship and improve the 
economies of their states.

Although colleges often successfully pursue both goals, there is a history 
of clashes between land-grant universities and agricultural-commodity 
producers, says Lawrence Busch, a professor of sociology at Michigan State 
University who studies agriculture.

Those tensions are accentuated in states where a particular group of 
commodity producers dominates ? as in Oregon, where the wood-products 
industry is the largest manufacturing employer, with 75,000 jobs. Such 
influence, Mr. Busch says, "if not seriously examined, can lead to a 
distortion, if not a subversion, of the public interest."

Western Forests and Fire

Forest fires are a major problem in Western states, and in Oregon academic 
scientists have played a prominent role in studying them. Years of 
unusually dry weather have made forests more vulnerable. Researchers agree 
that periodic large blazes contribute to natural, healthy forest ecosystems 
by clearing out brush that can inhibit the growth of trees. But decades of 
federal efforts to suppress forest fires have had unintended consequences 
by allowing brush to accumulate, so that when fires do break out, they burn 
more intensely.

That was illustrated in 2002, when Oregon sustained the largest known 
forest fire in its history. Called the Biscuit Burn, the blaze destroyed 
500,000 acres in two national forests in the southwestern corner of the state.

The fire rekindled a longstanding public debate: how best to restore the 
health of burnt forests and what to do with the charred, dead trees. Many 
of the Biscuit Burn trees were only partially burned, and had some residual 
commercial value as timber if cut down, a politically popular idea in Oregon.

Over the previous decade, the federal government ? which owns the majority 
of the forests in Oregon ? had curtailed logging, largely for environmental 
reasons. But in 2002 the Bush administration started to encourage the wider 
use of salvage logging, and so the U.S. Forest Service authorized a volume 
of logging in the Biscuit Burn area that represented one of the largest 
proposed single harvests ever on federal land.

Salvage logging has generated disagreement among academic scientists for 
years. Some studies have shown that the practice poses serious 
environmental risks, such as soil erosion and reduced habitat for wildlife. 
But relatively little research directly examined a key argument by 
supporters of the practice: that it helped speed forest regrowth after a 
fire and reduced the potential for subsequent fires.

Enter Mr. Donato. He had never had a strong interest in those questions, 
but he got involved in the issue because he was looking for a topic for his 
master's thesis. An Oregon State professor had received a federal grant to 
study salvage logging and took him on as a research assistant. Mr. Donato, 
who grew up near Portland and earned a bachelor's degree in forestry from 
the University of Washington, did most of the fieldwork, along with another 
graduate student.

He and his colleagues examined test plots within the Biscuit Burn in 2004, 
before salvage logging began there, and in 2005, after trees were removed.

Their results led them to conclude that salvage logging reduced regrowth 
and heightened the short-term risk of another fire compared with burnt 
areas left alone. On test plots that had been logged, the median number of 
new-tree seedlings was 71 percent lower than on unlogged plots. What's 
more, there was significantly more woody debris left on the ground in the 
logged areas as a byproduct of logging. That created a higher risk of 
fueling additional forest fires that could damage or wipe out new trees, 
the researchers found.

Then they wrote up their results.

Attempt at Censorship

In what would be a coup for any graduate student, the paper was accepted 
for publication as a short report in Science, the most prestigious American 
scientific journal, with Mr. Donato as the first author. Science published 
the paper on its Web site in early January and a few weeks later in its 
print edition. In between, all hell broke loose.

The gap in time between the two publications ? an artifact of scientific 
publishing in the age of the Internet ? gave the paper's critics a chance 
to muster a campaign against it. Nine scientists, including six from Oregon 
State, wrote Science asking that the printed report be delayed, or at least 
that the journal run their critique in the same issue. Science refused.

Critics have since called the professors' move a stunning attempt at 
censorship, unprecedented in forestry research. The university's Faculty 
Senate called it a threat to academic freedom. The senate said the proper 
route for protest should have been to submit the critique to Science for 
later publication, which the dissenters have now done.

Faculty members also noted that one of most vocal dissenters was John 
Sessions, a forestry professor. Mr. Sessions was a coauthor of a 2003 
report that supported expanding the use of salvage logging of the Biscuit 
Burn beyond what the Forest Service had initially planned, based largely on 
the economic value and volume of available wood. The agency cited his work 
in its decision to expand the proposed logging area. (The expanded area 
represented just 5 percent of the burned area, but some environmental 
groups in Oregon nevertheless called that too much.)

Mr. Sessions has also supported the view that salvage logging can help 
burnt forests regrow faster than if they were left alone.

In an interview, Mr. Sessions says that he and his co-authors on the 
January letter contacted Science because they felt they had an obligation 
to correct what he calls sweeping generalizations and glaring 
misrepresentations, arguing that it takes longer than the two years covered 
by Mr. Donato's study to reliably determine how many of the growing trees 
will survive to maturity. He also says the salvage logging on the Biscuit 
Burn was not done immediately following the fire, as he had recommended. As 
a result, the logging damaged trees after they had begun growing.

An Unusual Critic

Detailed technical analysis of Mr. Donato's report also came from an 
unlikely source, a U.S. congressman, Rep. Brian Baird, a Democrat from 
Washington. He obtained Mr. Donato's data after filing a request under 
Oregon's open-records law and later sent a long critique to Science.

Representative Baird is a co-sponsor of a bill, the Forest Emergency 
Recovery and Research Act (H.R. 4200), that would allow federal managers to 
speed up salvage logging by waiving federally required environmental 
reviews, which delayed the start of logging in the Biscuit Burn. At a 
February hearing in Oregon, Mr. Baird grilled Mr. Donato, who appeared as a 
witness. A researcher sympathetic to Mr. Donato called it an "inquisition." 
Mr. Donato called it "painful."

Mr. Donato says he has been working around the clock responding to 
criticism of his study and has received more than 700 e-mail messages about 
it, most of them in support, some nasty. He says he has had no affiliations 
with environmental groups, despite what he describes as efforts by some of 
the study's critics "to show that I'm some kind of environmental whack job" 
out to stop logging, which "is clearly not the case."

"I just want to go back to being a quiet student again," he says.

While his team has arguments to rebut its critics, the group could not fit 
them into the Science report, whose format allowed only about 600 words of 
descriptive text. He says that both sides of the salvage-logging debate 
have erroneously argued that the report presented a definitive scientific 
verdict on the practice.

In a written statement posted on the College of Forestry's Web site, Mr. 
Donato and his colleagues said they wanted the paper "to stimulate 
discussion and further research with some much-needed and thought-provoking 
data on an under-studied topic. We have apparently achieved this!"

Even supporters of the paper say that, in general, the forestry-college's 
research findings do not appear to be biased toward industry interests. But 
those supporters have raised questions about a lack of neutrality during 
the controversy by the leaders of the college, especially Dean Salwasser.

He has said publicly that he reviewed a copy of the critique of Mr. 
Donato's paper before Mr. Sessions and others sent it to Science. In a 
written statement he issued in January, Mr. Salwasser focused on the 
limitations of the Donato study.

He later said he wished he had tried to talk the scientists out of asking 
the journal to delay publication.

Charlie Ringo, the state senator who obtained Mr. Salwasser's e-mail 
messages from January under the state's open-records law, says they show 
that the dean's efforts were more extensive: "It's clear to me that the 
dean was acting as the pivotal person in coordinating the response to 
minimize the political fallout from the Donato paper," Mr. Ringo, a 
Democrat, said in an interview. For weeks, he said, Mr. Salwasser's 
"exclusive focus was to diminish the credibility of the paper."

In other e-mail messages, Mr. Salwasser provided suggestions to an industry 
representative about getting rebuttals to Mr. Donato's paper published in 
newspapers. In another, he talked about providing the rebuttals to U.S. 
Rep. Greg Walden, an Oregon Republican and a sponsor of the salvage-logging 
bill.

Mr. Ringo adds ? and some faculty members agree ? that it was awkward for 
Mr. Salwasser to testify before a Congressional committee in November in 
favor of the salvage-logging bill when researchers in his college had 
raised questions about the environmental effects.

Pressure on Revenue

Mr. Sessions and his fellow professors were not the only people who were 
unhappy about Mr. Donato's paper. Mr. Salwasser received numerous e-mail 
messages from legislators and industry representatives who were worried and 
angry about how the study might hurt salvage logging and Mr. Walden's bill.

In response, the dean wrote of respecting the scientific process and 
academic freedom. But he also wrote to a forestry-college professor that he 
had to respond to the criticism if he wanted the public to support the 
college's long-term budget needs.

Because of declining state and federal appropriations, the college faces a 
$4-million shortfall by 2008 in its $26-million budget. Possible solutions 
in the college's budget plan include raising more money from a variety of 
sources, including industry.

Another option listed by the college is getting more money from a statewide 
tax on timber sales, which provides 15 percent of the college's research 
funds, either by raising the tax or harvesting more timber. The tax 
essentially provides an incentive for a cash-strapped public university 
like Oregon State to support more logging.

The same can be said of Mr. Walden's bill, which would set up a federal tax 
on sales from salvage logging. The proceeds would go to peer-reviewed 
research projects, especially by universities, on the long-term effects of 
salvage logging and other efforts to regrow damaged forests.

Mr. Salwasser, who became dean in 2000 after a career in the U.S. Forest 
Service, says the college pursues research of interest to groups that 
finance its work but does not skew research findings accordingly.

He says he has examined his role in the controversy, which has consumed 
much of his time since January. He has given Mr. Donato what some 
colleagues consider belated congratulations for landing his paper in 
Science and now says it contributed "significant value" to existing 
knowledge. The dean has set up a committee within the college to develop 
guidelines to support academic freedom.

Mr. Salwasser calls the public release of his e-mail messages 
"gut-wrenching," adding that he wrote some off the top of his head.

Of his Congressional testimony, he says it is "appropriate" for 
administrators at a land-grant institution to influence policy that is 
relevant to their subject areas. "In hindsight, I may have crossed the line 
a bit into where you're actually advocating for the policy, as opposed to 
just advocating that what we think is known," he says.

He says he is "sorting through" whether he should have represented himself 
as the dean or as just another scientist when he testified. He also notes 
that his testimony was endorsed last year by a committee of the National 
Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges that represents 
administrators of colleges of forestry and natural resources.

If Mr. Walden's bill is enacted ? which may be doubtful given the partisan 
deadlock gripping Congress this year ? more land-grant colleges may face 
similar questions involving conflicts between researchers and commodity 
producers. Agricultural colleges have generated many worse dust-ups, says 
Mr. Busch of Michigan State, who led a study of financing by an 
agricultural-biotechnology corporation, then called Novartis, of the 
plant-biology department of the University of California at Berkeley (The 
Chronicle, August 6, 2004). Some scientists have been fired or blacklisted 
for crossing their states' farmers, he says.

Such incidents have waned in recent years as land-grant universities have 
diversified their research portfolios beyond agriculture, Mr. Busch says. 
Still, state funds for research have been flat or declining, making 
industry's support important. And colleges of agriculture and natural 
resources have increasingly employed environmental scientists and 
sociologists whose work is seen as threatening by some commodity producers.

In 2003, for example, an economist at the University of California at Davis 
wrote a report supporting arguments by Brazil that American exports of 
cotton violated an international trade agreement. The World Trade 
Organization later sided with Brazil. In response, the president of the 
California Cotton Growers Association called on the university's donors to 
question their financial support and likened the economist's work to treason.

When such situations arise, it's up to the college's administration to 
stick up for the faculty, Mr. Busch says. "You have to tell the commodity 
groups that over all, they come out ahead by having this research done for 
them," he says, "even if occasionally something comes out that they don't 
particularly appreciate."

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