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March
20, 2001
Does
Bush Consider Caribou On-line Porn?
Why I
Was Fired From
the Geological Survey
by Ian
Thomas
[Ian Thomas
is a former Mapping Specialist at the GIS & Remote Sensing
Unit Biological Resources Division United States Geological Survey
Patuxent Wildlife Research Center. He was fired by the Bush administration
for posting maps of caribou migration and calving areas inside
the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge on his website at the USGS.]
Well, I have
been fired for posting to the internet a single
web page with some maps showing the distribution of caribou
calving areas in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR).
My entire website<http://www.mbr-pwrc.usgs.gov/geotech/> has now been removed
from the internet. This represents
about 3 years worth of work and 20,000 plus maps showing
bird, mammal and amphibian distributions, satellite imagery,
landcover and vegetation maps for countries and protected
areas all around of the globe. As far as I aware it was one
of the biggest collections of maps online and certainly the
biggest collection showing maps of biodiversity and the
environment. The website was often visited by over a
thousand visitors each week. In addition, I was fulfilling
roughly a dozen requests for geospatial data and information
from colleagues, other researchers and the general public
each day.
All of this
comes as a rather big surprise to me. I was
given no chance to remove the webpage or even finish writing
an appeal before my position was terminated. I was working
under a contract so I believe I have very little legal recourse.
I have received no written explanation (or even an email) stating
the exact reasons for the termination decision and I understand
that even though this would be a reasonable courtesy to expect,
it is unlikely to be forthcoming.
From my viewpoint
my dismissal was a high-level political
decision to set an example to other Federal scientists. I base
this belief on the following information I received from a colleague
in Alaska who is a leading researcher on the issues involved:
"I really
hope you don't get fired. In fact, had the timing
of what you did not been so inappropriate based on
everything else that was going on, I doubt that anyone would
have noticed. Your work showed a lot of initiative..."
"...the
fallout would not have been so great had the subject
matter not been one of the three USDOI super hot topics with
the new administration and had we not been briefing the
Secretary at the nearly exact time your website went up.
Everyone is nervous and as I mentioned earlier, consistency
in presentation is paramount."
So now, I believe
my only recourse is to appeal to the
general public in the hope that in the future what just
happened to me will not happen to others.
I would recommend
anybody in a similar circumstances to
contact the fine people at Public Employees for
Environmental Responsibility (<http://www.peer.org>) or a
similar organization.
The response
and support I have received from friends online has been truely
amazing. I very much appreciate how quickly
people have acted on my behalf and helped publicize my
plight and I especially wish to thank the international
mapping community...receiving letters of support from far
away places cheers me up no end. Please feel free to forward
this email to other lists and media contacts! I would also
be grateful if anybody who misses all the maps I put on the
internet please contact the USGS to let them know and to ask
that the maps be reposted.
I feel very
bad that these events are also affecting my
colleagues at Patuxent. Patuxent was a great place to work,
has amazing researchers and everybody I worked with is very supportive.
Many, many
thanks for your support,
Ian Thomas
<free_world_maps@hotmail.com>
The Details:
Nobody instructed/authorized
me to post the web pages on
Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. It was done on my own
initiative. I was working on land cover maps for all
National Wildlife Refuges using the new National Landcover
Datasets. Last week I published over 1000 land cover maps
online covering every National Wildlife Refuge and National
Park in the lower 48. (These maps have now been removed from
the internet too). Similar land cover data for Alaska were not
available but the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge had a
good landcover map so I included it.
In the past,
I helped produce the only set of maps online
showing all bird species distributions in Alaska. In
addition I have produced online mammal distribution atlases
of Africa, maps for tigers in asia and I was working on
digitizing North American mammal range maps produced by the Smithsonian
Institution.
I have also
been conducting background research to prepare
proposals to study the effects of mineral extraction on
biodiversity and protected areas on a very large scale. One
such proposal that I was preparing would have looked at
exporting analysis and mapping methods applied in the United
States to other regions of the World such as Africa. The proposal
was co-sponsored by the Mineral Division of USGS and the World
Resources Institute.
The migration
of caribou in North America is the closest
thing that we have to the great mammal migrations that occur
in Africa. African protected areas are also under great
pressure from possible development for mineral extraction.
So the carribou distributions that I found on the Fish and
Wildlife Service public website were of particular interest.
I have also worked for several years on maps of migratory
bird distribution patterns. I therefore have a great interest
in other migratory animals as many of the temporal mapping problems
are similar.
I was completely
unaware that there was anything wrong with publishing ANWR maps.
I have never been informed of any
agency restrictions or any other guidelines on publishing
maps depicting ANWR...I only now have been informed that
there is a two week old agency "communications directive"
that limits who is allowed to distribute new information on
ANWR within my agency.
I thought that
I was helping further public and scientific
understanding and debate of the issues at ANWR by making
some clearer maps. I also hoped that colleagues in USGS
would see the maps and then contact me if they needed
additional mapping help. I was careful to quote my sources
and explain what I had done. I made no statement about what the
maps might mean with regard to oil development of the refuge.
The web pages
were put up on Wednesday, March 7, last week. The first thing
I did when I put the ANWR pages up on the internet was to inform
other USGS Biological Resources
Division mapping people and other agency (Fish Wildlife
Service and National Park Service respectively) GIS people
through email that they were on the web. Informing other
Federal colleagues and agencies immediately upon publication
to the web appears to me to be the only reasonable review
process available, seeing as there is no internal review
website currently available...I have never been informed of
any other established proceedure for review of web content
on our site. I actually haven't had any complaints about or
requests to change any other map on my website.
I assumed that
if anybody had a problem they could contact
me directly and quickly and appropriate steps could be taken
almost immediately. I received one warning from a colleague
that the maps I put on the internet should be removed. Unfortunately,
it was sent on Saturday so I did not receive it in time. I think
the decision to terminate me was taken before I even got to work
on Monday.
I also assumed
that because all I was doing was esentially
presenting existing public information in a clearer and improved
format, there was very little need for any extensive review other
than the steps I took. Indeed the changes that I made to the
original Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) web maps were simply
to digitize them ("trace"), then overlay them on satellite
and vegetation maps and then summarize how may years specific
areas were a high density caribou calving area. I found a similar
(poor quality) summary map on the FWS website that allowed me
to check the accuracy of my simple analysis.
I was unaware
that FWS had updated the data. There is no
mention of updated information on the FWS website. This new data
has still to be made public. If my maps were inaccurate in any
way so are the public FWS maps I copied.... (please refer to:
<http://www.r7.fws.gov/nwr/arctic/pchmap2.html>#section6)
I think that
over the last three years I have put more maps
up on the internet (at a guess approaching 20,000 to 30,000 static
individual maps) equalling any other website on the
world wide web. So out of the tens of thousands of maps (and
hours) I finally publish one that got me fired....I suppose the
odds were going to run out eventually....
I am concerned
that other Federal researchers may easily
make the same mistakes I just made and should learn from my example
what happens if you're not careful.
Patuxent was
a great place to work, has amazing researchers
and everybody I worked with is very supportive.
Old Homepage
(no longer available)
<http://www.mbr-pwrc.usgs.gov/geotech/home.html>
The Global
Environmental Atlas (no longer available)
<http://www.mbr-pwrc.usgs.gov/geotech/cindi/world.html>
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