OSU grad student not welcome in "marketplace of ideas"

Prior to landing his plum job as the conservative columnist at The Oregonian, contributing two columns per week (if that), David Reinhard worked in the Reagan administration as the special assistant to the assistant secretary of energy for conservation and renewable energy. I know what you're asking, and yes that does make Reinhard's efforts to blame (partly) for the roll-back of the Carter administration's forward-thinking energy policies and helped land us in the energy crisis that our nation finds itself in today. So, hat's off Dave!

I bring this up, not because Dave's most recent column concerns our nation's "addiction to oil" or about Dubya's investigation into record oil company profits. Rather, his column deals with another science controversy- that of the reaction to a paper by Daniel Donato, an OSU graduate student, that found that logging fire-damaged forestland can turn out to be damaging to the future health of forests. Donato's paper, to the dismay of the logging interests that sponsered it, found that unmolested portions of land from the Biscuit Fire grew back faster and healthier than logged portions of land. This paper caused quite a commotion on the OSU campus, as faculty attempted to silence its foundings and prevent its publication in the nature journal Science. Donato's findings also contradict the proposed bipartisan salvage-logging legislation sponsered by Reps. Greg Walden and Brian Baird.

Dave begins his column with his beef that opponents to Walden-Baird's bill are taking their cues from a study produced by an individual who doesn't even have a master's degree in science. That's funny, considering that the degrees Dave received are a bachelor of arts degree from Albright College and a master's and doctoral degrees in history at Pennsylvania State University. That's right, Dave hasn't studied a lick of science in his collegiate career, but seems to feel that he is in the position to tell us that we should ignore the results of a study from somebody who has.

And what's the difference if Donato hasn't received his master's degree yet or not? Once his degree is conferred, does that add any special weight to his report's findings? I mean, it's kind of like attending a speech given by Bill Gates, a Harvard drop-out, about business development and wise financial investment, only to have Dave advise us to ignore Gate's advice?

Anyways, Dave proceeds to go into statistical muckedty-muck. I'm not going to pretend to be an expert on statistics and biology here- and neither should Dave. (Anytime you want to talk history, I'm all ears, Dave!) In his confusing rhetoric about 71 percent of forestland versus 41 percent versus 56 percent, the reader yawns and flips over the Letters to the Editor column. How is Dave going to try to make a point and convince readers when he loses them two-thirds of the way through?

I admit, though, I managed to make my way through it. And caught this doozy:

The fact is this figure [71 percent in Donato's study] has nothing to do with Walden-Baird bill. It allows logging to begin 90 days, not two years, after afire, windstorm or other catstrophic event and before seedlings have sprouted. It actually mitigates the mortality problem that Donato highlights.

Right, cause if you clear-cut the land and not allow the forest to naturally regenerate itself, there will be no signs of an unhealthy forest. Nifty, eh?

The main point here is, of course, money. And the fact that OSU's Forestry School's primary source of funding is from interests who would prefer to have Donato's findings squelched, can you really be surprised? Wouldn't it be a little irksome to have logging interests fund studies to show that logging helps forests, only to be welcomed with the opposite conclusion? Indeed, the logging interests who's hopes on a big payday ride on the passage of the Walden-Baird bill threatened to have the funding cut to the team of OSU grad students that revealed the conclusions opposite to the industry's liking. Throw in to two Northwest Congressmen beholden to these same logging interests, and the result is their 'bipartisan' salavage bill, which swaps the national interest's- healthy forest land- in exchange for a special interest, the logging industry.

Over-all what I find interesting is that Dave is taking the side of those who wish to censor the findings of Donato's report. Now that it's too late to halt the publication of the report in Science, Dave, a non-expert, is taking up the effort to dismiss the report as "weird science." Conservatives love to talk about the "marketplace of ideas", in which Donato's report certainly belongs, whether it ruffles feathers or not. For Dave to dismiss it is to show him as the true conservative hypocrite that he is.