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dam-l DFO's muzzling (fwd)
Phil said:
> Dianne,
>
> Surprised that in your discussion of DFO muzzling you didn't mention the
> time a few years ago when DFO prevented John Rudd from speaking on his work
> (in New York, I think?) ...
>
> Phil
hah! ;) so many occurances to remember I suppose. hard to keep track!
I did manage, you see, to get a copy of the report from Rudd, Kelly,
Hecky and the other person - a preprint that eventually ran in Ambio.
And I'm not based in New York. I do remember Grahame Hamilton
of the Montreal Gazette covering that and it was one of the pieces
our group used for our information display.
Joseph Cummins - a geneticist at U of Western - passed me a really sleazy
piece of non-information produced by HydroQuebec which was NOT peer-reviewed,
unlike the Ambio piece. Someone had been glad-handing at a conference and been passing out these supposed reprts that purported to make it look as
if there were no similar effects in northern quebec... they did
so by leaving out all boggy terrain! :-p And the references
truly sucked.
It was the kind of thing that gets students big fat F's on first year
university science papers. It was by some chemist.
I have it upstairs in a pile of references... I'll have to
dig it up and give the reference. I want to check before I give any
names.
Other cases:
Hans Neu [Bedford Institute of Oceanography] and Don Alderice [BC
DFO fisheries biologist] developed health problems as a result
of trying to relay their results to the public and being repeatedly muzzled.
Hans had a stroke and had to take early retirement.
Dr. Alderdice, from what I read in a John Goddard article in Harrowsmith's
expose on Kemano, suffered heart problems and also had to retire.
The angst at the Freshwater Institute is amazing as well though I'll
leave names out.
And of course the protest resignations of David Schindler and Bob Hecky
as heads of ELA are a matter of public record.
[ELA is the Experimental Lakes Area for anyone who's not familiar ->
a lot of powerful research has come from there, including John Rudd
et al's seminal greehouse gas research.
Something is very much the matter up the line at DFO and it needs to
be remedied.
From what David Schindler has told me, DFO seems bent on bowing out of
freshwater reserch all together. They've been shopping around,
as some of you might know, for some time now to find a substitute
funding source. My feeling is that this is because having such
forthright scientists is a liability to their bureacratic careers.
Schindler has said on more than one occassion
that his time as head of ELA was spent battling it out
with Directors-general who were always sending gag memos and then he would
let *everyone* know they were trying to silence him. Andhe would call people
get on the line to say, Digby McClaren with the Royal Society of Canada.
Now this was largely on acid rain research *but* this just points out how
very fraught with politics government research tends to be.
The results are still great but they are shushed up.
I think that Schindler's tactic of fighting with them and not letting them
shut researchers up is effective but tiring. It's not the only
way to get around the problem but it is one way.
What's everyone else think?
-Dianne
> Philip Raphals
> Directeur adjoint (Associate Director)
> Le Centre Hélios - Stratégies énergétiques et environnementales
> Helios Centre for Sustainable Energy Strategies
> 651, rue Querbes
> Outremont (Quebec)
> Canada
> H2V 3W6
>
> (514) 277-2405 (telephone)
> (514) 277-8282 (fax)
>
> Raphals@NetAxis.qc.ca
>