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Salmon killer?

Albany Democrat-Herald Editorial

July 6, 2007

Democrats in Congress last week charged that Vice President Dick Cheney helped kill salmon on the Klamath River in 2002. How so? He apparently had a hand in devising a plan that tried to assure that farmers in the Klamath Basin would have enough water to keep their operations going.

In September that year, tens of thousands of adult salmon died in the river because of gill-rot disease, a condition that may have been aggravated by low water conditions and an unusually large return of fish that year.

The main charge is that Cheney manipulated, suppressed or otherwise acted against science for political motives.

Instead of condemning public officials on such grounds, we ought to be grateful to them for taking into consideration the needs and interests of American citizens.

If there’s a water shortage and farmers need an allocation to survive, then surely it’s a good thing for federal water authorities to try to help them. And if Cheney had anything to do with this, as reported from Washington, he deserves no blame.

Science is supposed to inform what people do, not determine that they do. When there’s an election, we don’t vote for science; we vote for people who can make decisions. We need the political process to mediate among the various branches of science, and between science and the public interest when they seem to conflict.

For example, various branches of the natural sciences might advise it is best for farmers to be thrown off their land so that the earth can recover and fish be left alone. Social science and medicine, on the other hand, would predict such such a move would cause human suffering, physical and otherwise. In such situations we expect our elected officials to consider the alternatives and make a choice. If the reports from Washington are true, it looks as though Cheney did.