The director of the Fish and Wildlife Service defended the agency
requirement that two employees going to international meetings on the
Arctic not discuss climate change, saying diplomatic protocol limited
employees to an agreed-on agenda.
Two memorandums written about a week ago and reported by The New York
Times and the Web site of The Seattle Post-Intelligencer on Thursday set
strict parameters for what the two employees could and could not discuss
at meetings in Norway and Russia.
The stipulations that the employees “will not be speaking on or
responding to” questions about climate change, polar bears and sea ice
are “consistent with staying with our commitment to the other countries
to talk about only what’s on the agenda,” said the director of the
agency, H. Dale Hall.
One of the two employees, Janet E. Hohn, is scheduled to accompany a
delegation to Norway led by Julia Gourley of the State Department at a
meeting on conserving Arctic animals and plants.
Tina Kreisher, a spokeswoman for the Interior Department, parent of the
wildlife service, said the memorandum did not prohibit Ms. Hahn from
talking about climate change “over a beer” but indicated that climate
was “not the subject of the agenda.”
The other employee, Craig Perham, an expert on polar bears, was invited
by the World Wildlife Fund to help advise villagers along the Siberian
coast on avoiding encounters with the bears, said Margaret Williams,
director of the Bering Sea program of the fund.
With increasing frequency, polar bears are being found near the villages
of the Chukchi in part because their migrations have shifted as warming
trends alter the sea ice.
In 2006, after a 15-year-old girl was killed by a marauding bear, the
local groups reached out to Russian scientists and the World Wildlife
Fund for help, Ms. Williams said. She asked the Fish and Wildlife
Service to take along Mr. Perham to seacoast villages less than 250
miles from Alaska to offer his expertise.
A memorandum on Feb. 26 said Mr. Perham “understands the
administration’s position on climate change, polar bears and sea ice and
will not be speaking on or responding to those issues.”
Mr. Hall, the director, said in an interview Thursday that “these
memoranda could have been better worded,” but that requiring strict
adherence to a set agenda had “been a longstanding practice.”
Asked for the formal agenda of the Russia meetings, Ms. Williams of the
World Wildlife Fund said no such document had been negotiated.
“There was,” she said “an invitation letter from us to the Fish and
Wildlife Service. It always talked about human-bear interactions.”
Top-down control of government scientists’ discussions of climate change
heated up as an issue last year, after appointees at the National
Aeronautics and Space Administration kept journalists from interviewing
climate scientists and discouraged news releases on global warming.
The NASA administrator, Michael D. Griffin, ordered a review of
policies, culminating in a decision that scientists could speak on
science and policy as long as they did not say they spoke for the
agency.
In April, John H. Marburger III, President Bush’s science adviser, sent
the new NASA policy to more than 12 agencies, including the Interior
Department, urging them to follow suit.
(Por Felicity Barringer,
The N.Y. Times, 09/03/2007)