That's what the US Bureau of Land Management seems to be doing to Oregon State University after the journal Science published a study that "undercut Bush administration-backed arguments for logging after wildfires," reports The Oregonian.
Administrators at OSU and scientists elsewhere said they could not recall another instance of the federal government suspending funding for research after controversial results emerge.
"It's totally without precedent as far as I can recollect," said Jerry Franklin, a professor at the University of Washington who has studied Northwest forests for decades. "It says, 'If we don't like what you're saying, we'll cut off your money.' "
In "Post-Wildfire Logging Hinders Regeneration and Increases Fire Risk," OSU grad student Daniel Donato and five OSU and U.S. Forest Service scientists concluded that logging in areas burned by the Biscuit Fire in Southern Oregon damaged seedlings that were growing back on their own and littered the forest floor with tinder that could fuel future forest fires. They argued that salvage logging "can be counterproductive to goals of forest regeneration and fuel reduction." Russell Sadler, in an op-ed for The Register-Guard in Eugene, Ore., points out that this study "conflicts directly with an earlier study conducted by OSU academic heavyweights John Sessions and Mike Newton, which concluded that salvage logging and reforestation after the Biscuit Fire could result in faster forest regeneration."
The Donato study was politically inconvenient, because the Bush administration and U.S. Rep. Greg Walden, R-Ore., are using the Sessions-Newton study as the basis for Walden's latest amendments to the Healthy Forests Act of 2003.
Federal officials counter that it was the on-line reference to the Walden legislation that led the BLM to freeze the grant. "I don't think it's politics; I think it's a matter of violating research protocols," The Oregonian quotes Jim Golden, deputy regional forester with the Forest Service. Federal law prohibits the use of federal research funds to influence federal legislation. Donald Kennedy, editor in chief of Science and former president of Stanford University, said the mention of the Walden bill was the journal's mistake.
The funding issue hasn't percolated into the national media yet, though the brouhaha over the study's publication last month did. Some faculty members at OSU had tried to persuade editors of the peer-reviewed scientific journal from publishing the study, a move for which the dean of the school's College of Forestry later apologized, according to an AP story. "Few faculty, let alone graduate students, get their work published in this prestigious journal," wrote Hal Salwasser in a letter to the university, saying that he should have told dissenters to voice their criticism through open scientific debate.
The episode created concern that researchers at the respected forestry school face a backlash if they reach conclusions that clash with the timber industry and leading faculty. The College of Forestry gets about 10 percent of its funding from a tax on logging.