PEER Strikes Out

February, 2007

The news reports were suitably horrifying: park rangers at Grand Canyon were under strict orders to dodge visitor questions about the canyon's geological history. Why? Because the theocratic Bush administration wanted it that way. Too many of Dubya's friends were upset by any suggestion that the earth might be more than 6,000 years old.

"In order to avoid offending religious fundamentalists, our National Park Service is under orders to suspend its belief in geology," stated Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) Executive Director Jeff Ruch. This denial of reality has extended far beyond the personal beliefs of park officials, affecting all employees and visitors. Employees of the park are not permitted to give an official estimate of the canyon's geological age, and are instead required to reply with "no comment" if posed with the question. (Emphasis added.)

The shocking news, this past December, made headlines quickly. Columnists shook their heads, letter-writers fumed, and even Doonesbury weighed in at this latest example of the Bushite tyranny in action. One more abuse of the Constitution by the gang of thugs that brought us the Patriot Act, chipped away at habeas corpus and used "signing statements" to ignore separation of powers. When's it going to end?

There's only one trouble: the horror story wasn't true. There was no gag order; rangers at Grand Canyon were giving out solid geological information to anyone who asked. The only concession made in recent years to the religious fundies was the presence of one book, with a creationist viewpoint, on sale among many others in the park bookstore... annoying, perhaps, but far from catastrophic.

Jeff Ruch and PEER were telling a great big fib.

And because the Bushites have done so many mind-bogglingly despotic things in the last six years, people were ready to swallow PEER's baloney.

When I first heard of PEER, back in the 1990s or so, it seemed to consist of a bunch of U.S. Forest Service employees concerned with their agency's spotty record toward environmental protection. The organization provided a way that workers from the Forest Service, and later on, other agencies, could help bring public scrutiny to bad decisions made by the agencies supposedly looking after our public resources. Sounded like a good idea to me; the Forest Service has long been far too cozy with Big Timber. I was pleased when the group began to show interest in National Park Service affairs, too; Lord knows, government employees with consciences, no matter what their uniform, need all the help they can get.

However, PEER changed focus over the years. Somewhere along the line it turned away from the original vision of an environmental watchdog, expressing the concerns of dedicated public servants. By the new millennium, PEER reconstituted itself as a pressure group, advocating a narrow and elitist view of the way our public lands should be managed. Public access counted for nothing, in their view; "recreation" was a dirty word. Historic preservation went out the window; in their view, parks should eradicate signs of human presence wherever it was found.

How did this happen? Perhaps because the composition of the group shifted. Inspection of PEER's web page these days shows a management staff consisting largely of veteran activists and litigators, with only a minority listing any background in public land management agencies.

In other words, PEER got hijacked- by the sort of people who don't mind embellishing a story if it gets better press than the truth.

When it came to the Grand Canyon story, it didn't take too long for people to realize that they'd been hoodwinked. My fellow flat-hat blogger, Ranger X, did a wonderful review of the unfolding meltdown of the PEER hoax- if you want the play-by-play, check his blog. A couple of columnists wrote angry, "I was had!" follow-ups, but mostly, of course, the story just faded away. Sensational charges make the front page; corrections are buried inside, if they appear at all. Plenty of people, I'm sure, still believe PEER's nonsense.

PEER's own follow-up press release on the affair eschewed any apology, and tried to pretend nothing amiss had taken place. Instead, Jeff Ruch and Co. just repeated some other, less-sensational complaints about Grand Canyon and hoped, apparently, that everyone would forget about that groundless "gag-order" accusation.

National Park circles were abuzz about the whole business, of course. First, there was the "Can you believe this latest Bush BS?" reaction, then the response from Grand Canyon people: "Wait a minute, everyone- this is crazy! It's just not true."

Once the truth got out, the natural reaction from most National Park people was, "Well, that's the last time I believe anything from PEER without checking it out for myself."

Most park folks, yes, but not me. PEER did not lose a drop of credibility with me over the Grand Canyon hoax, since I'd already seen them in action, and gotten a good look at their standards of accuracy.

Back in 2003, Apostle Islands National Lakeshore was in the middle of something called a Wilderness Suitability Study: how much of the archipelago, already assured of "preservation for future generations" by its status as a national park, merited the extra protection- and strict limitations on management and visitor use- of inclusion in the National Wilderness system? The twenty-one islands were remote, to be sure, and forest was growing over the sites where man and women and eked out their lives long ago, but how much of that area met the stringent criteria of the Wilderness Act: an area

...where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain... an area of undeveloped Federal land retaining its primeval character and influence... which generally appears to have been affected primarily by the forces of nature, with the imprint of man's work substantially unnoticeable.

And what of the islands' history? Though the islands were long-deserted, there was a time when hardy pioneers farmed and fished from homesteads on their shores. The 1970 law creating Apostle Islands National Lakeshore was clear in its mandate: Congress directed the NPS to preserve both the natural and historical resources if the Apostle Islands. Wilderness designation, requiring that an area be managed to give the impression that the land had never been trodden by human feet, would make historic preservation nigh-impossible within wilderness boundaries.

In the end, the study group, of which I was a member, offered its recommendation: eighty percent of the park's land area would be designated as Wilderness. Three islands, with particular historic significance, would be excluded from Wilderness designation, along with a few acres on the remaining eighteen: the lighthouses, a handful of docks, and the like. These "excluded" islands would retain every bit of protection they always had: the laws and policies that protect any national park still applied. The purpose of excluding them was to fulfill the charge that Congress had made some thirty years before: to manage the park in a way that values both the natural and human history of the islands.

PEER didn't see things that way, though. The organization released a statement accusing park planners of promoting a scheme to commercialize the islands. The diatribe read, in part:

PEER believes that an unspoken agenda is at work here. Perhaps the NPS vision of a possible way to interpret the environmental history of the islands is to engage in, or authorize others to engage in, large-scale landscape manipulation. Among the possibilities that the NPS may be contemplating is reinstitution of human occupation through lease and sale of Federal lands... so that the new occupants can recreate past husbandry and commercial practices.

The NPS would allow this under the guise of "restoring a cultural landscape." ... PEER's suspicion is abetted by the NPS statement that Basswood and Sand Islands "would provide for flexibility in planning the preservation and interpretation of pioneer farmsteads, historic stone quarries, and logging camps."

In other words, PEER was doing its best to spread a tale that the park was in collusion with unnamed interests to re-establish commercial farming, logging, and quarrying operations on the islands, "under the guise of restoring the historic landscape."

This accusation would have been infuriating if it hadn't been so silly. If the rabble rousers at PEER had done the slightest bit of homework, they would have seen that no one in their right mind would want to take shot at reviving industries that died off many decades before the National Lakeshore was even established.

Farming on the islands- never more than a subsistence proposition- died with the Great Depression. The quarry industry was long gone by that point: the last quarry closed in 1897. Logging? A marginally more credible supposition, I suppose, but still completely untrue.

Basswood Island stone quarry, abandoned since the 1890s.

There's a reason the sons and daughters of the pioneer farmers looked elsewhere for work when they grew to adulthood. There's a reason the stone quarries on the islands lost business to mainland operations. You just don't make money going into business on an island in Lake Superior.

But PEER didn't know that... or perhaps they knew and didn't care. Perhaps PEER (and now I'm using their tactic) understood all along that it doesn't matter if you tell whoppers; even if you're caught eventually, plenty of people will read the initial blaring headlines, and miss the retraction.

Perhaps PEER itself has "an unspoken agenda" to build up its dues-paying membership by any means, fair or foul.

Or maybe PEER just makes an amazing number of honest mistakes; take your pick.

But remember:

When you hear it from PEER, check their sources, my dear.

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More On This Topic:

The Ranger X Blog: an excellent dissection of the PEER hoax.

Skeptic Magazine tracks down the facts.