Customer Reviews

White Goats, White Lies: The Abuse of Science in Olympic National Park

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This book maintains that the National Park Service (NPS) has used inadequate science to reach the conclusion that mountain goats are not native to the Olympic Peninsula and therefore should be removed from Olympic National Park. The books is fully convincing on this point: NPS science would not survive an audit. This is not the only park where this is true - - indeed, the elk controversy in Yellowstone involves one of the same park biologists, Doug Houston.

Lyman seems unaware or unconcerned that almost no science would survive the kind of spotlight that he has trained on the NPS. This has been a recurring theme in the sociology of science, for example, and it lies behind the claims of many in that field that scientific truth claims are socially constructed and not "true" in the sense intended. Thus, one might make this part of a wider argument about science, but Lyman does not do this. Indeed, Lyman seems certain that the application of enough research effort generally yields a unique, widely-accepted and true conclusion. (One might challenge the validity of each of those adjectives, I might note.)

Instead of thinking about the use of science for policy problems, Lyman chooses to go at the NPS like a cross-examining attorney. The NPS maintains that the people who introduced mountain goats to the park in 1925 did so because they wanted to establish a new game animal in the park. Lyman insists there's no proof this is true. He's right, there isn't any smoking gun. But the likely groups involved are a hunting club and the US Forest Service, with possible involvement of the Biological Survey. Why else would these people introduce goats? Especially in 1925, before the issues of exotic animals and the health of ecosystems had become important to policy making? One can, like Lyman, demand ever better proof but at some point you have to present your own interpretation of the facts. Lyman does not do this.

As a result, this can be a frustrating book. Lyman has certainly been right to call the NPS on its sloppy science and its unwillingness to test its own hypotheses or to consider serious alternative hypotheses. That critique will sustain an article or two (which Lyman in fact published before this book). That critique alone won't sustain a book, unfortunately - - for a book, Lyman needs to develop an alternative story of his own. In other words, if he wants to criticize NPS claims that mountain goats did not live in the Olympics, a book is the right place to make the alternative claim that goats *did* live in the Olympics.

Lyman provides a sketch of what that alternative would look like, and it would probably mean that mountain goats became extinct during a warming period about 4000 years before the present. Demonstrating this would require finding goat remains at an archaeological site. Lyman recognizes all this. Unfortunately, and even annoyingly, he never commits to this alternative. Indeed, he often admits that the NPS position may well be correct, and concedes that it is even more likely to be correct than incorrect despite its shaky scientific foundations.

In that case: why get so worked up about this? Put this effort into a problem where the NPS uses shaky science and then show that the Service is actually wrong, not just maybe wrong.

Or better still: Lyman could have taken this story and moved to the broader policy questions. When science is uncertain, and it usually is, how do you make policy decisions? Should the burden of proof lie on the NPS? On anyone who proposes policy change (thus privileging the status quo)? Or should the burden of proof be imposed on outsiders who choose to challenge the "experts" of the NPS? There are no easy answers to those questions, and the mountain goat question would have provided an interesting vehicle with which to explore them. But, alas, that is not the book that Lyman chose to write.